Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"bean counters in collaboration with satin" (satin?)
When I was in the Civil Service Satan was the Inland Revenue (or vice versa). There was always some, apparently new, IR regulation as to why this wasn't an allowable journey, even when the reasoning contradicted that given for disallowing the previous journey.
"all it guarantees is that top management weren't in control of the company"
Trevor's analysis was that this level of detail wasn't something that would be expected to go up to the top management. I agree with that. Being in control shouldn't mean micro-managing. It should, however, mean that standards are set in relation to the way customers are treated and that breaching those standards are a disciplinary matter. So I'd expect a top management in control of its company to exercise that discipline.
It might well be the case that such standards hadn't been set in which case it might be somewhat unfair to the execs concerned if top management didn't eventually follow them but that's a matter for the board. In the immediate aftermath of things going wrong like this, however, it's the top management who are in a position to act sufficiently quickly, not the board.
"I know you want someone's head on a pike (god damn it, you're angry...)"
Nothing personal; I don't have a Lenovo & use Windows only rarely so I'm not directly affected. My response was purely on the basis of what Lenovo need to do to maintain trust. The same would apply to any other company that breaches customers' trust.
Back in the day we used to hear about businesses being customer focussed; I even worked for one which, at that time took it seriously. Since then just about every big business seems to have joined the race to the bottom. When they get there they have no more advantage over their competitors than when they started; their competitors are still right alongside them. They have no cost advantage over their competitors. In the PC world they are selling kit using the same component bins as their competitors with the same OS as their competitors. The only thing they can compete on is their reputation.
And I disagree with you that reputation only lasts a few months at most. It's a long term asset, hard won, easily lost and, once lost, even harder to regain. So once something like this happens they need to send out a message that this is not typical of they way they want to behave and that breaches of customer trust are and will continue to be a sacking offence.
On the whole I agree with you Trevor except you've missed out one thing - the need to have responded positively and fast. Not only should top management have immediately cottoned onto the fact that this was bad but they should have said so, located the execs responsible, fired them and checked for any similar stuff in other crapware, including in discontinued products, and dealt with it in the same way.
It might or might not have been mildly unfair to the execs but it would have sent a powerful message to the rest of the company and customers that this will not happen again.
From the customer's point of view, of course, the fact that the crapware brings the price down to below cost is good news providing you never intended to use the original OS anyway.
I suggest you go back up the thread & read thames's posts. You will find that the kernel, you know, the bit that the allegedly shouty Mr Torvalds is responsible for, is now 64bit. The problem is in the userland.
Changing to 64bit in userland is a bit more of a problem than just recompiling everything with a revised time_t declaration as there may be existing data with the 32bit format which will have to be handled sensibly by the new software. That will be a matter for every application which produces and consumes such data.
"Alas, Tristram, it looks very much as if you never got to my second paragraph... "
According to the down-votes it looks as if a lot of other people didn't either. So have an up-vote from me to help counter-balance.
As I've written here before I worked on Y2K as well and the client's bean-counters decided to demonstrate it really was a problem. What they actually decided to do was to wait until mid-January before they'd let us cut over to the new system (which they'd already tested & accepted) because they didn't want to take the risk of using something new before they'd completed their year-end stuff. This despite being warned. Yup, Y2K was a thing.
One house I bought had originally been wired up in Edwardian times & only had bits & pieces of wiring added after that, none of it with the benefit of any sort of earth connection. Some of the main bedroom fittings had wiring brought down from the roof space in metal conduit (the lighting wiring was in wooden conduit). The earth wires from the fittings were simply twisted round the top of the conduit. On lifting some floor boards in one of the children's bedrooms I discovered that the earth of the sockets there was a six inch nail driven into the mortar of one of the walls. It got worse - in the other child's bedroom the earth was a six inch nail driven into a joist.
" I though GCHQ had nothing official to do with the US"
Keep up at the back there.
It's illegal for NSA to spy in the US but legal (in US law) for them to spy in the UK & it's illegal for GCHQ to spy in the UK but legal (in UK law) for them to spy in the US. So each contracts out their spying on their own populace to the other. Everyone's happy except for the plebs and they don't count.
"The goal of advertising is not to increase the available wealth of the target, but but have him allocate wealth differently than it would have been done otherwise."
And it's very effective. I quite frequently reallocate my business away from companies who pester me.
"What parent, in their right mind, wants a corporation listening to the private musings of a Barbie-aged child and/or neighbor children, talking to a doll?"
The really worrying thing is that there are lot of them who will just love the idea of that email summary.
" I dread to think what things were like back when the first people to see the results were the processing staff at Boots....."
We know what things were like then: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/julia-somerville-defends-innocent-family-photos-1538516.html And yes, it was Boots.
"The purpose of the secure boot is to establish a chain of trust from the power ON."
Yes, and it's a very short chain.
" If you, as a root/admin or OEM, install malware which does MITM - UEFI secure boot will not stop you (and it is not even designed to do that)."
This is my point. The chain of trust isn't even long enough to ensure that the OEM OS image is trustworthy.
It might have been a great idea at some time to make a genuinely trustworthy system but if so it was inadequate. For that to happen the boot process would have had to have the capacity to inspect the OS's certificates and if it found any deemed untrustworthy eliminate them or boot into a very restricted mode. Of course many of us might find this sort of behaviour unacceptably intrusive; there's always a trade-off between usability and security.
Alternatively it might have been a marketing ploy to give customers a feeling of security and maybe try to block attempts to load other OSs by establishing a degree of ownership over the hardware.
What it clearly doesn't do is ensure that it the customer at least starts off with a trustworthy machine.
The whole point is that secure boot is supposed to establish a chain of trust. A chain of trust requires each link in the chain (and you know what they say about chains and weakest links) to be trustworthy. So if Microsoft is signing a bootloader as trustworthy then they should have assured themselves that the system it's loading is trustworthy otherwise that chain of trust means nothing.
If that system is Lenovo's spin of Windows then it's up to them to assure themselves that Lenovo can be trusted to produce a trustworthy system image. That requires Lenovo in turn to assure themselves that anything they include is also trustworthy. It requires due diligence all down the chain.
"The sad thing is, they were almost always the kids from poorer backgrounds, with parents who thought education was a waste of time."
This is one of the core problems. If parents and their communities in general form an environment where kids aren't encouraged to get on the schools will have an uphill problem. Their first task, more important than teaching literacy, numeracy or anything else must be to teach the kids that this stuff will be within their grasp and worth grasping.
"...certainly this is true for me and my family, we all want to know that if we’re using a smartphone for transactions, sending messages, having private conversations, that we don’t have a bunch of people compromising that process"
He doesn't seem to quite grasp that it's true for the rest of us in Europe. Apparently Europe's objections to privacy compromises are based on trying to do down US corporates for commercial reasons.
"continuously improve the site until it does do what is required."
OK, let's do a thought experiment.
As an alternative to consulting your doctor you go to a health advice site looking for advice on some symptoms you have.
You get the first iteration. I tells you you have nothing to worry about.
The next iteration would have asked some more questions and identified a few possible complications.
The final iteration would have asked you even more questions and identified that you have an uncommon but very serious illness and should contact your doctor immediately.
Unfortunately having had the misleading advice that the first version gave you you didn't get in touch with your doctor and didn't live to get the advice you needed.
Was the agile-developed site useful to you?
"The Civil Servants that manage IT projects need to have a proven track record of (5-10+ years) software development (using a key language like C/C++/C#/Java/Python/Ruby etc...) and managing software development teams."
No. They need to be able to analyse requirements properly. No amount of years experience with any number of languages will be of benefit if the requirements keep changing every 3 months.
Historically the survival of any particular document has been a matter of chance. Some Anglo Saxon charters survive as originals. Some older documents have survived in particularly favourable environments. For the most part, however, texts from antiquity have survived as copies several generations removed from the original and the more copies were made the greater the chance that one or more has survived.
I don't see that changing in terms of digital texts. Anything posted to Geocities, for example, is long gone unless someone copied it - archive.org doesn't seem to have got it all. If Google decided that Groups should go the same way as Wave how much of Usenet would survive?
If we are to have digital records available far into the future we need to do three things:
Have multiple archives of what is to be preserved*
Each archive needs to copy its material onto new media as old ones become obsolete
In addition to copying material archives need to translate obsolete file formats into current ones**
* What is chosen for preservation is a thorny problem. Every time an archivist decides to weed the archive their decisions will be incomprehensible to someone. I remember some years ago wandering into a 2nd-hand bookshop in Cromer and bound volumes of Nature that the county library had disposed of crammed into all sorts of corners.
** Ideally one format that can be kept current for a long time - long in an archival sense. PDF/A?
'In the main, the "plebs'" lives aren't very interesting - not even of today's "plebs."...Certainly there are things that need to be preserved - the back ground of historical events and agreements'
Maybe not from your point of view. However as you're not the only person in this planet that's a fairly limited one. Social historians find these lives much more interesting than the doings of the political classes.
To take one tiny area - how did the domestic textile industry of the West Riding evolve? Just how did the clothiers operate? How did this differ from the domestic industries of other areas such as the Cotswolds? How did it differ from the development of the metal-working industry of the Sheffield area? Manorial and parish records are remarkably unforthcoming about this aspect of their inhabitants. These are not trivial historical concerns; these trades launched parts of the industrial revolution and yet our understanding of them is quite limited.
" the retarded ULTRA-LARGE/ULTRA-WIDE picture format newly employed that is currently de rigueur with every web designer priding him/herself on being irredeemably autistic and subscribed to all the premier webby lifestyle magazines"
Does this remind you of anyone?
Let's hope the fad passes soon.
I assume the downvotes came from web designers.
"we just all need to start replying to all Nigerian/Ivory Coast/Congo/etc 'princes' and they'll eventually get overwhelmed"
I'd like the mail services to add an option to forward each mail in the junk folder to the Reply to addresses of all the other mail. That would overwhelm them PDQ.
