Posts by sketharaman 99 posts • joined 6 May 2019
When I joined Wipro in 1988, my employment contract included a "No Moonlighting" clause. So did the employment contract of every other Indian and American IT company that I worked for since I left Wipro in 1991. In the current case, the 300 fired employees not only violated the no moonlighting clause but, by working for competitors, they also probably broke nondisclosure provision in their employment contracts.
Quitting a WhatsApp Group in my circle is a big deal, which is why I configured my WA in such a way that others can't add me to groups by themselves, which is the default feature. What they can do is to send me an invite à la LinkedIn and it's up to me to accept it and join the group or not. I've noticed that, if I don't accept an group invite, I get 1/10th the number of questions from others as when I leave a group. This new "Quit Quietly" feature is great for me.
As for why it was not built as default, I happened to ask an ex-WhatsApp PM about this. He told me that, especially in small groups, when people communicate with A, B, C, and C leaves quietly, it could cause misunderstanding because they think they're still communicating with C. Made sense to me.
"We think health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention". Well said Neil Lindsay, even if in a canned statement. Indeed. With the kinda hoops it makes people jump through, the primary healthcare system in the West forgets that people who seek it are actually sick.
When we had a roadshow at a certain 5 star hotel in Frankfurt 20+ years ago, I asked the banquet manager if they had a power backup. He looked at me like I was crazy and told me that Germany has never had a power outage in his whole life. From there to building solutions to not only address a power outage but one that lasts so long that even the UPS runs out completely - a situation that I've never ever encountered in India in my whole life - the west has come a long way in infrastructure.
Going by the title, I thought a user had actually inserted a carbon paper into a laser printer and "Dan" removed it just in time before it could gum up the laser printer! This reminds me of a time when we came close to doing exactly that! Until then, purchase orders issued by customers of our IT company were printed on dot matrix printers. Since customers needed multiple copies, they would take three sheets, slip in a carbon paper in between each pair of them, insert the whole bunch into a DMP and print multiple copies at one shot. As sales reps, we'd "help" the customer in this process by hunting around for carbon paper, which was, for some reason, a precious commodity those days. Then came a time in circa 1990 when an MNC bank was going to place an order on our company. Like always, our sales rep went fishing around for carbon paper to help the customer to print multiple copies of the PO. But this customer turned out to use a laser printer - carbon paper not required. For the first time ever, we saw someone enter "3" against "number of copies" on the software's print screen, and three printouts coming out of the printer, one after the other, without any carbon paper! Memory serves, it was our company's first ever PO printed on Laser Priner.
Back when I got into ERP in the mid 1990s, there was no cloud, SAP used to strongly discourage customization on its onprem version. But I've yet to come across a single large enterprise that uses the SAP base product as it is, without some extension / customization or the other.
I wonder if cloud will be any different. Even assuming that cloud v. onprem is more than just a question of deployment, I don't see how a company's unique business process on onprem can suddenly be replaced by a standardized business process on cloud.
China's Alipay *is* RTP. USA's RTGS *is* RTP. There's no <something else> about them. They both exceed India's RTP value (UPI + RTGS) by a mile.
Kudos to UPI for what it has accomplished but that's not the topic here. Your claim that India does #1 RTP processing value in the world is total BS. Not one of the sources you posted supports your claim that India's $1T RTP value is the highest value of RTP processed by any country in the world.
But let this not stop you from posting dubious data and changing the topic when your BS is called out in public.
Well, even I could go around cherrypicking payment methods and claiming whatever I want.
If we include RTGS, USA does as much A2A RTPs in a week as India does in a year.
* USA: $805T / year.
* INDIA: $19T / year.
There's no comparison.
According to the Statista chart you have linked, India does $25.5 billion in real time payments. Which is extremely underwhelming.
How about posting the correct source for the 1 trillion figure?
ByTW, in 2019, Alipay alone did $17T in RTPs in China.
"SAP gets $37M in software subscriptions while Deloitte gets $117M for implementation of SaaS HR.".
They keep saying that SAAS has decimated implementation efforts but implementation partner is still getting 3$ in Services for 1$ in License! #GoFigure
I get unlimited free email inboxes from my hosting provider. I've never understood the need for Gmail or Google Mail Email Service Provider although a lot of people do use it.
https://gtm360.com/blog/2017/05/12/why-gmail-when-hosting-provider-gives-free-mail-boxes/
"The €746m fine (slapped on Amazon) was the largest penalty under GDPR to date, topping the previous record of €50m from the French National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) against Google in 2019 by almost 15 times."
Whatever happened to the €10bn GDPR lawsuit against Oracle and Salesforce reported by The Register last year? https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/privacy_collective_sues_oracle_salesforce_gdpr/
Totally agree. In another comment, I speculated that Apple could charge a fixed listing fee on *all* apps whether or not they generate revenues from AppStore (and elimiinate the current practice of charging a 30% variable fee on sales only on apps that generate revenues from AppStore.)
I don't know if that's what the OP means but it's very much possible to make purchases of in-app products outside an app: Log in to app's website; make purchase of virtual good; login to app with same creds; said virtual good is automatically made available as in-app product.
Totally agree. What Apple is charging is a 30% commission on sales, which is very much industry standard in the software industry (although it's getting wrongly interpreted as 30% MSC / MDR, which is ridiculously high). I wonder what will happen if Apple turns around and tells *all* apps to pay a flat listing fee, whether or not they generate revenues from AppStore, instead of the 30% variable fee it currently takes only from apps that generate revenues from AppStore.
Had the plaintiffs gone after the hosting or payment service provider of the alleged copyright-infringing websites, I somehow think the judge's decision might have been different. In one Michael Connelly novel, the outsourced digital marketer of an escorts agency website gets sued for prostitution. The court's verdict was that, the digital marketer is culpable if s/he takes its fees in the form of a commission on the escort agency's sales but is not culpable if they receive a flat fee. End of the day, this debate revolves around the exact remit and boundary of "aiding and abetting", which, as we all know, is a crime like the original crime.
True but, in the USA, AFAIK, "Probable Cause" is required to get an arrest warrant. Question is, was there probable cause in this incident? Given that the said document was clearly an internal company document, the answer appears to be yes. But, given that it was downloaded from a public domain website, the answer would be no. Tricky as it is, it becomes trickier considering that evidence gathered without probable cause would be inadmissable after the booking / arraignment stage.
Not FUD in terms of data access. But FUD in terms of anybody caring in USA. Oracle and Salesforce have publicly stated that they will use one customer's data to provide market intelligence to other customers. Although both companies are facing billion dollar lawsuits in EU over this GDPR violation, nobody seems to care about this in their core market in USA. Until the mid 2000s or so, leading US retailer TARGET had its online store on Amazon.com. AFAIK, Netflix still runs on AWS despite the obvious competition from Amazon Prime Video.
Totally agree. I've been in the IT industry for 35+ years. If there's one constant during that period, it's that CxOs always eat out of Gartner's hands. It's not only in large enterprises but even in the government, as another article on El Reg would suggest: Leeds City Council swallows the Gartner glossary and orders up 'post-modern' ERP in £44m SAP replacement (https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/leeds_city_council_erp/).
And it's not just buyers.
Given a choice between landing a Fortune 500 company deal and being featured in the Leader Quadrant of Gartner MQ, I reckon a majority of IT company CEOs would choose the latter.
Banks charge 2-3% MDR and take over the risk of default in payment by credit cardholder ("credit risk"). I can bet that BNPL providers, who charge 4-6% MDR, will also take over the credit risk from the vendor / merchant. Yes, it's too risky but BNPLs are getting a higher slice of the sale to cover their risk. End of the day, NO RISC NO GAIN, as it said on an HP RISC processor T-Shirt back in the day!
Technically you're right but the government's counter to this approach is, in a country with 450M WhatsApp users, and where stuff gets forwarded literally millions of times, it'd take a very long time to use this approach to trace the original sender, by which time the damage purportedly caused by the message would already be done. So the government is seeking a way to cut to the chase and have a 1-Click way of getting the info. From the government's pov, it's not an unreasonable ask, but, but the way WhatsApp says its app is architected, it will have to "unhaystack" the entire haystack to find the needle, which is obviously anti-privacy.
"Word's Web Layout view is little used, and users are only likely to encounter it if they open an HTML document in Word, or foolishly attempt to author web content there and save as HTML."
LOL. Guilty as charged!
I use the combo of Word, Excel and Outlook to compose, mail / merge and deliver my company's monthly email newsletters! Since it had images, Outlook's plain text mode was ruled out. I tried the Rich Text Format but the email occupied the entire width of the screen, which necessitated horizontal scrolling, which was not ideal. So, I was left with the HTML mode. At the time I started this newsletter, I had zero HTML / CSS skills but I was able to compose the mailer template in less than an hour. I've subsequently acquired rudimentary skills in HTML, CSS, MailChimp, and, most recently Amazon SES and I've tried to move my newsletter setup to one of those cloud options. But, for a combination of technical and commercial reasons, nothing has worked out, and I've kept coming back to my original MS Office combo. I know a lot of people think it's foolish to do HTML stuff on MS Word but, for a lot of non-geeks, it's simple. And works. Exhibit A: My newsletter has been going out on the first working day of the month for every month for the past 10 years and counting.
I have spent half my career in ERP and the concept of "how custom?" is a perpetual bone of contention between customers and ERP vendors. This is not only the case with old monolithic ERPs like SAP but also with modern ones. In https://gtm360.com/blog/2020/05/27/when-erp-projects-get-derailed-by-silly-reasons/, I give three examples, including one of SAP-Lidl, where customer felt the extent of customizations was minor, vendor agreed to implement them, and the movies had a sad ending.
What if more women turned off ads than men and are hence seeing fewer ads than men? This study has no way to know that. Claiming bias on the basis of just the information that these researchers can access is a reflection of bias in the study. Besides, when there are thousands of companies that post job ads on Facebook (and LinkedIn), how will a study based on the job ads posted by just two advertisers yield statistically significant results for the entire ad platform?
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022
