* Posts by Dr Abner Mality

11 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2015

Going public again would swell profits by two-thirds, claims Dell

Dr Abner Mality

What is Dell trying to hide?

Way back in 2001, I worked for a company helmed by a former Bain consultant who advised Dell how to stop hemorrhaging money and increase stock share value. His solution worked and involved no restructuring, no change in operations or products. Curiously, it did not involve increased profit margins on products sold. He simply directed them to change the way they declared income while keeping within SEC regulations. In other words, it was an accounting trick, the idea being that a market higher valuation enabled the company to access more capital. It worked well enough to let Mickey D take the company private again. I guess they still haven't worked out those fundamental operations flaws.

5 reasons why America's Ctrl-Z on net neutrality rules is a GOOD thing

Dr Abner Mality

Either this is satire or the writer doesn't live in the U.S. and doesn't understand how its publicly held corporations actually behave. Any innovations that result will appear in the accounting accompanying SEC filings, not the patent office.

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

Dr Abner Mality

Re: line up the complaints

"Your business is unimportant to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be ignored in the order it was received."

Nissan reveals self-driving chair

Dr Abner Mality

Re: "Societal"???

"Social" can refer to interactions within a group; "societal" refers to behavior of the group collectively.

What's next? FBI telling us to turn iPhones into pocket spy bugs? It'll happen, says Apple exec

Dr Abner Mality

BINGO!!! All the h8trs can h8 U, but you are oh-so-spot on. What we're really seeing in the FBI-Apple drama is the collapse of Apple's Reality Distortion Field launched and maintained by Steve Jobs. This will not end well for Cupertino.

Dr Abner Mality
Alert

Denial is not a river flowing through Egypt

Why do so many not think Apple and Cook are capable of the same FUD and misdirection tactics used by every major vendor? Read "The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism" in the online Frankfurter Allgemeine [http://goo.gl/Ji06iV]. The article targets Google, but let's be real: all smartphones are Trojans designed to scrape as much personal info about you as they can, including Apple products. Google supports Apple against the FBI because the diversion provided by protracted litigation is in Google's best interests, business-wise. If the app or service costs the user nothing, then the real product in this business model is user data -- all of it. And we all freely give ourselves away. Either we accept the notion that Internet privacy is a myth and conduct our online behavior accordingly or, like Tim Cook, behave hypocritically and live in denial.

Did you know ... Stephen Fry has founded a tech startup?

Dr Abner Mality

You mean he didn't launch "Ask Jeeves" all those years ago?

Brit censors endure 10-hour Paint Drying movie epic

Dr Abner Mality

Re: Brilliant

You know the screening was the commercial release version. Forget the commentary, I'm waiting for the complete Director's Cut! Can you imagine what wound up on the cutting room floor?

Someone please rid me of this turbulent Windows 10 Store

Dr Abner Mality
Terminator

Re: I gave up writing applications for Windows since Windows 8.

I just posted my own mini-rant about how hideous Win10 is for XP diehards like myself, then saw your comment. If market responsiveness is any indicator, Microsoft seems to be in a corporate version of a persistent vegetative state. Since XP did everything I wanted, up to a point, and Vista was such an abortion some folks show PTSD at its mere mention today, I saw no compelling need to upgrade beyond XP SP3. Then clients' file compatibility needs overruled my OS preferences. I effin' hate Win10. I can't help but think that some 3rd-party body has introduced or is working on a shell or skin that emulates XP's navigation and operational ease. Your post makes think you may have considered doing so or perhaps know of one already in existence. If either is true, feel free to contact me via Gmail at jdfregs with "Bill Gates still eats his boogers " as the subject. Thx.

Dr Abner Mality

Re: What went wrong?

Users who went to Win10 straight from XP (i.e., yours truly) must contend with a nightmarish scenario with 10's incomprehensible navigation and site organization. And worse still, are the automatic upgrades that wipe user preferences and skim user data -- you have to drill down deep to identify and turn off inflection points hiding as applications. If it has the MS logo, I guess it's not spyware, it's an app. (Why let the bad guys get personal information for free when you can charge them for it?) I'm waiting for an XP-like skin or shell that returns identifiable structure to my desktop computing experience. Ideally, it would also have a privacy filter built in.

EMC dives into Iron Mountain's cloudy backup lair

Dr Abner Mality
Gimp

Maybe they'll make it all the way to 2005

Having written free-lance blog entries for Iron Mountain's customer-facing website, all I can say is, "Meh." They seem to understand everything about records only from a storage standpoint. Nothing transactional, no decision support, analytics -- none of the things you can do with all that unstructured data you're stashing away. They claim they can provide failover and other disaster recovery methods, but their approach shows that their stuck not only in a ferrous hillock but in Big Iron as well.