Posts by venkatarangan

India’s Bharti Enterprises now largest shareholder in UK's BT Group

I am reading in the media in India, that BT was one of the earliest investors in then "startup" Bharti Airtel. It looks like things are coming a full circle. Best of luck to Airtel and BT.

Google borrows from Android to make ChromeOS better

Didn't Microsoft try something like this, two decades ago with their PC OS, Mobile OS and Windows CE?

When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product?

I share your experience and relate to it. Almost three decades ago I learned from GW-Basic, Assembly, C and now mostly Python. Over the years, from an engineer, I have become an entrepreneur and now a consultant, hardly writing any code unless I have to. But nowadays, with LLMs, I am writing again more code and yes it is Python. Instead of turning to search for an utility, I just get ChatGPT to generate a Python script to do whatever I am trying to automate during my day and life is good. Productivity has certainly improved. It is all in the prompt and my experience, you need to do about half-a-dozen interactions with ChatGPT before you can coherce it into generating something that you can use and solve your problem.

Yes, the legal question is very valid. I suppose there is no point in copyright for software anymore, other than for proprietory techniques and patents scenarios. Thanks.

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

You may be right

Reading your article, Initially I was not sure whether you are sarcastic, as the general perception about Microsoft & Windows is that, while for Apple is admiration as in the new Calc App in 2024. That aside, I can relate to what you are able to see with Recall for RPA use-cases. I have always been saying, that as Gen Alpha (and even Millenials) come in numbers to workforce, they will refuse to work with the current set of dumb enterprises applications which have no memory or personalization about their usage - this is a generation that is used to their Netflix, Spotify, TikTok and Instagram surfacing content even before they knew they want to see it, where as current enterprise applications force the users to repeat the menu navigation every single time, even though that is the job description for the role.

I hope Microsoft sees the potential for RPA usecases, especially with the power of LLMs and their magical 'agent' calling mechanisms.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Usenet can be the alternative to social media

Thanks for this article and the pointers - I followed them and setup an account and checking out groups from thunderbird.

Decades ago, I was a regular user of Usenets and I had completely forgotten about them till this article. For people looking to alternatives to social media and big tech, Usenet can be a viable alternative. Surprising, it is still alive yet they are not popular.

VideoLAN to India: If you love FOSS so much, why have you blocked our downloads?

My country's (India) bureaucracy is legendary. In this case, I suspect there was something that triggered the ban and now that reason would've got forgotten.

The officialdom has great inertia to do anything. No one wants to stick their head out and revoke the ban. They never get punished/held accountable for inaction, so why risk with action? They will wait till the courts order them to do, so that they will never get blamed.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Simple, yet a heartwarming experience. Demonstrates the need for software engineers (and product managers) to keep visiting and observing the users and the usage of their work.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Well-articulated summary of the state of mobile browsers.

Apart from Apple, which you have rightfully explained, Google too is equally culpable. They make a great engine with Chromium, but on their mobile OS, Android, they too limit it and don't promote its capabilities due to the same vested revenue interests, of course not to the success (revenue) levels of Apple, which Google will be wishing they can.

In recent years, I have heard Google talk less and less of PWAs in Windows & Mac, while Microsoft without any App store strategy of their own, is the own which is trying to promote it. Last week, there was a huge hue-and-cry over Microsoft trying out a search bar in the desktop of Windows 11 internal builds that opens in Edge only. I too wish it didn't behave that way, but the critics are going after a beaten horse.

The tech biggies have proven over the last few decades, that they will not any consumer GOOD on their own, they will not adapt to the times but only protect their interest (innovators dillema) and governments & society have a role to make them change. Sadly, in 2022, that's where they have brought the free world.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

SQL Server injection to rescue

Once I was involved in a similar situation in a clients place. They had forgotten their AD Admin password on a production web & db cluster. Luckily this was before SQL Server the patches from Microsoft after a well-known attack had been applied. I simply executed an ASP page with 'poison' SQL query to execute, CMD.EXE with a parameter to run "net user username password /add" and then another command to add to the global admin. Voilla.

Then, dutifully I executed the Microsoft patch on all the server for SQL Injection and instutionalised a process with the developers to sanitize all their HTML inputs.

Microsoft releases command-line package manager for Windows (there are snags)

//The question was whether to drop support for applications with legacy installers that are not transactional and have unpredictable behaviour.

Drop such support, and Winget would be less useful. Maintain it, and Windows trundles on, seemingly never escaping its disorganized past.//

Well put. I wish Microsoft brings the container technology from 10X so that all this mess can be hidden away inside individual container for every application.

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

As computers became sophisticated, Solid State drives replacing the (un)beloved Hard Drive, and of course, cloud computing, the reliability we get from our devices are very high that we get complacent on having backups.

One thing I will give it to the older systems was that we (users) had the power and control to figure out what went wrong and try to fix them, in today's systems we (and so do the OEMs) have NO idea on how they work, and what went wrong.

Worldwide Web wizard Tim Berners-Lee sticks wellington boot into Worldwide Web's giants: Time to break 'em up?

Thank God, we have people like Sir Tim Berners-Lee who have the courage and the credentials to call out these issues that we need to work on. Philosophically speaking - if we (Humans) as a species learn to handle Social Media well, which was the first truly global integrator, we will mature to do greater things.