And 2x bad == ?
really, really bad?
193 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Feb 2015
To replace their Lumias with either iPhones or Android phones. I have a Lumia 920 that I got as an employee at Nokia Mobile Phones before Microsoft took them over. Its battery life sucks - a few hours without charging at best, compared to about 3 days on my Galaxy S5 with a similar load.
These users should file civil lawsuits against Sony for theft of services. The fact that Sony will not stand with their customers tells me that they should have no customers... I used to like Sony gear, until the CD root-kit fiasco. Now, I will not purchase ANYTHING they sell. No CDs, DVDs, no gear, and I won't go to any movie that they produce.
My wife was hit with fraudulent activity on her American Express card after using it at Target. Fortunately, AMEX is very good at detecting fraudulent activity on their cards, informed her immediately that someone was using her card info to purchase a computer in the SF Bay area, and asked if it were authorized. NO! was the answer. They contacted the police. The perpetrator was arrested with computer in hand. All of this tool a few minutes. She had a new card the next day...
This is when "modern" systems would support multi-factor biometric access - a palm print and iris scan for example. After all, if it is chip+pin, then I could give the chipped card and pin to someone else and nobody would know until the security videos were reviewed, and maybe not even then.
It's good that the 640xl has a replaceable battery, because all Lumias suck at battery life! I have two, and they have to be recharged continuously otherwise they die after a few hours of doing nothing! My Samsung Galaxy 5 and OnePlusOne both run for 2-3 days without needing to be recharged, even when being used constantly. And they charge faster!
Disclaimer: I worked at Nokia Mobile Phones when Microsoft took over that organization, and I and about 12,500 other employees were let go. No joy there!
After having implemented a complete TCP/IP protocol stack from the DDN white books for a real-time operating system in the early 1990's, a customer (truck engine manufacturer in Indianapolis) found some problems in dealing with out-of-band data. I have "fond" memories of sitting in a little office in a very noisy manufacturing plant debugging and fixing the code. It took about a week of effort, but I was able to nail the problem and make an appropriate fix in our code, which was pushed out to all of our users, including the US Navy.
So, what happens when the government mandates backdoors and access to this data? Guess what? The criminals will be close behind! Here we go again!
I am not saying that the credit card industry doesn't need to incorporate stronger security and encryption - it does. My wife was hacked when Target was pwnd. Fortunately, the card she used was an American Express card, and they are very good at detecting fraudulent activities - someone tried to purchase a computer in Freemont California (we live in Illinois) on her card, and they blocked it, informed the police, and the perpetrator was arrested, computer in hand! My concern is that the attitudes of our current FBI, DOJ, CIA, NSA, and other government officials are seriously undermining our efforts to be more secure. This has to stop!
This is why I will not EVER purchase anything from Sony, ever again! In the past, I have had a lot of Sony gear - technologically, they were great devices. Unfortunately, Sony has lost sight that "the customer is always right", starting with the CD root-kit fiasco. So, screw them I say! Vote with your wallet! Don't give them a penny!
"Thou shalt use free and open source software, when possible!" - key in sound of thunder...
Actually, that sounds good to me! Sometimes you need to use proprietary cruft - all of my software is FOSS except for my software engineering tool Sparx Enterprise Architect. At least the cost is reasonable, and it runs well on Linux with Wine.
This is why running Windows in public systems such as schools, government agencies, etc. is a totally stupid idea! Most such systems allow the primary user Admin privileges. This is not the case with Linux/Unix systems (though giving a user sudo privileges with NOPASSWD option will provide similar access), without specifically allowing such access. Look at all of the cities in Europe that are migrating totally to Linux. Safer. More difficult to penetrate (stupid applications notwithstanding). Linux with SELinux extensions enabled makes it even more difficult to pwn systems like this.
My father, a well-known physicist, once showed me the power of capacitors, and to NEVER point a screwdriver or other pointy metallic object at the big ones! His research equipment had a lot of really big caps, and after grounding himself properly (I was a lad of 12 or so at the time), from 5 or 6 feet away from the gear, pointed a screwdriver at the fully charged capacitors - ZAP! A 6 foot lightning bolt surged from the caps to the screwdriver! I don't know how many watts it was, but if he hadn't taken the proper precautions, he would have been toast!
That was a lesson I have never forgotten.
I have worked with Java since it was released in the mid-1990's - I got my first cut from James Gosling himself when I presented a paper at an IEEE conference in Boston. I have studied the JVM source code and have done considerable research into garbage collection methods. Java's mark/sweep methods are inherently non-deterministic, hence Java's tendency to have problems with system behaviour and performance when dealing with memory management. At the time I met with Gosling I had finished a deterministic reference-counted garbage collector which after 20+ years is still running many major semiconductor, display, and disc drive plants world-wide. 10+ million lines of code with no deletes and no memory leaks - systems that run on a 24x365 basis. I just wish java systems I have worked on were that reliable!
So, if you want me to work in a Java shop - go find someone else who has a taste for self-flagillation...
If I were to call Rogers an idiot, that would insult idiots everywhere. If ANYONE can break into encrypted communications, then it is NOT secure, and everyone can that wants to. Tell this a*hole to first put all of his communications in plain text online for all of us to read. If he is willing to do that, then maybe we'll bare our asses to his probing ministries.
It's time the Unix/Linux world started migrating to a 64-bit time_t value instead of a 32-bit one for clock settings. Yes, some systems would be borked, but it would not be likely any more severe than Y2K was. That would keep us functional, time-wise, until some time when the sun goes dark and turns into a nova.