* Posts by greatpix

7 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2017

John Deere tractors 'bricked' after Russia steals machinery from Ukraine

greatpix

DEFINE "BRICKED"

Apple can brick your phone. If they do, throw it away, it can't be "unbricked" by Apple or any whiz kid. Is this the case with a combine or tractor? Living in South Dakota I have long known about the ability to brick horrendously expensive farm equipment but have never understood if their definition of "brick" is the same as Apple's. If it is, then we need legislation to prevent that practice. My understanding is that in the U.S. farm equipment manufacturers no longer sell their equipment, only lease it and if that's the case, Bob's your uncle.

Apple is happy to diss the desktop – it knows who's got the most to lose

greatpix

In the land of luddites

Re: "Legacy of single user on a disconnected PC". I am literally that. I have oen desktop configured with all the apps, MS and otherwise, that I need. It is connected to nothing except by a thumbdrive onto which I load my work product and transfer to my connected workstation.

No upgrades, no pushes, nothing to interfere with a setup that will never see a cloud or a rainy day either.

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

greatpix

Re: Why is there a choice?

If the hard reset works that should be preferable to a software fix. Why? Because, as anyone involved in the development cycle knows, fix one thing and that patch is liable to break something else that only shows up once the user has it hands on. It is well understood that no matter how many QA tests are run, in the field the user will ALWAYS execute some action that the testers, in their wildest imagination, would never consider happening.

F***=off, Google tells its staff: Any mention of nookie now banned from internal files, URLs

greatpix

Re: US military services

Just to muddy the waters (pun intended), the Coast Guard is also America's inland navy, responsible for all navigable waters in the U.S. including rivers.

Prior to the mashup that created Homeland Security the Coast Guard was under the aegis of the Treasury Department (as was the Secret Service).

Amazon, ditch us? But they can't do without us – Oracle

greatpix

Don't consign Oracle to the dust bin yet...

The US government is totally reliant on Oracle and getting that elephant to move would take a generation; knowing Trump's hatred of Bezos is extreme is like insurance for Ellison.

We are talking about hundreds of millions in annual revenue.

Press 1 for bill shock, 2 for outages... AWS touts call-center management-as-a-service

greatpix

So, why does Amazon have the best CS on the planet?

From time to time I have had to call Amazon. A screen pops up asking call now? Call later?

Selecting "Call Now" has the phone ringing in a matter of seconds.

Nobody else even comes close. Even better, they solve your problem then and there.

Trump signs 'no privacy for non-Americans' order – what does that mean for rest of us?

greatpix

There should never be an expectation of privacy in the EU because, in fact, there is none. The intrusions into the privacy of European citizens by their own governments far exceeds anything done in the US.