
Danger, Will Robinson!
With a hydrogen atmosphere, let's hope they don't discover fire -->
99 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2020
Why don't they turn this inwards and identify the flaws in the OS and all the other products they produce to make the whole operating environment more secure in the first place? There should be an international standard for software security that has to be complied with BEFORE a product can be sold - it it should cover hardware too. Big fines if found to be sold without full compliance.
Why does every Cumulative Update for Windows versions always go from 0% to 100% fairly quickly, then drop back to 0% and proceed to 20% before sticking there for ages until it finally creeps up to 100% ? It's done this for years now. Why can't they just look at how many files or bytes they have to replace and give percentage progress based on files or bytes copied?
Add to that, the software that updates/installs and sits at 100% for minutes? It's either done or it isn't.
I suddenly remembered an audio file I used to have way back in the early 90's that purported to be Bill Gates saying "Don't ever tell me something that you don't want me to use against you...". I feel like that about all voice assistant technology - I don't trust it not to listen in, to record and upload for "analysis", and to then try and advertise, monetise or otherwise screw you over based on that information.
If I was to go into a car showroom and pay for the car in cash, by a bank loan or other external means of funding, will this still be enabled? Or will I always be at risk of my car turning against me accidentally, maliciously or otherwise? I'd want a written guarantee that the 'feature' had been fully disabled or I would walk away from the purchase. Mind you, if it had keyless entry and/or start, I wouldn't buy it without the ability to disable that 'feature' too.
I feel that when I use a search engine, I use it to get suitable (hopefully) suggestions related to the search terms I've entered and listing them so that I can see the relevance and the source so I can make my own judgement as to which links to explore further and which to avoid like the plague. I'm not searching for philosophical discussion about the search item or any other bollocks. If that was what I wanted I would start with Wikipedia and search from there, not use a generic search engine. A search engine's job is to aid navigation and filtering of web content based on your query. The only AI it needs is not to show me pages that are only obliquely linked to the search terms, or that are in Polish or Chinese when I've selected UK as a search criteria or controlling filter.
The customer of my ex-employer that I took on (see earlier post) had a no-training policy. They wouldn't invest in their own staff in case they left once their new skills had been acquired. They were happy to pay for expensive contractors to cover the skills gap though. I never did fully understand their logic, even though I benefited from it.
There's a big difference between leaving a company to join a competitor and being made redundant and looking for work in the same field. When I was made redundant I went freelance (because I was too old in my 40's to be considered as employable!) and approached some of the customers of the old employer to do the same work for them as I was doing before, and got the contract from one as they knew me. Not long after I received an email from the MD of the ex-employer suggesting that I was in breach of contract by approaching their customers. I emailed back saying that I no longer had a contract with them as they no longer employed me, so bugger off - or words to that effect. That was the last I heard from them. A couple of years later they had gone bust, especially as many of the staff who remained decided it wasn't a place they wanted to work at any more.
But Office(insert number less than 365 here) is not resilient. What is the real cost of local support vs. cloud subscriptions? What is the real cost of downtime to an organisation? What about somewhere big, like the NHS, with Office offline?
When the cloud was first offered as a solution, it was assumed that your data would be available from anywhere at any time and it would be held in multiple locations to make it resilient in terms of access, security and backups. Everything is fine while it works, but one screw-up seems to be able to take it all down at once.
I tend to think of cloud services as a form of ransomware - you have to keep paying to have access to your data, and there's no guarantee that it is any more secure than it would have been when held locally. The only thing it seems to be good for is the profits of the cloud companies. I seem to remember when Bill Gates was in charge, one of his dreams was to have a recurring monthly income stream.
Have you been reading my CV? ZX80 and Acorn Atom kits, written stuff in 6502 assembler and understand the way the processor works - not just chucking cut and pasted stuff from a website at a compiler and hoping it works. We had to squeeze the best out of the computer with minimal onboard resources, so it had to be written efficiently - no wasted bytes or cycles. No wonder modern code is often so full of resource leaks and security holes.
Usually at or near the top of the class in all courses undertaken, but once I reached 48 I couldn't get a new job after redundancy as I was considered "too old to learn". Been through CCPM, DOS, Windows from v2 onwards, Netware, NT, Linux. Done hardware, software, databases, websites, system support, customer support, IT management, infrastructure management, networking, installations, consultancy, but still not good enough.
Experience no longer counts, even though we see jobs wanting x years plus of experience with y, even though y has been out less than x years! Business is no longer prepared to train people, but ignore those with the most experience at the same time. I had to go freelance to get any IT-related work at all and I'm finally retiring next year at 68.
Icon: Grumpy old man ------>
I seem to remember when living in Germany in the early 80's that if an accident involved tree damage, the tree had to be paid for out of the insurance claim too. When the RAF Harriers did their field exercises deployed in the edge of woodland for cover, there was a bill to pay for every tree damaged or knocked over - particularly expensive during wet weather when it was easier to uproot a tree or two.
Maybe businesses should look at the toughest of all the states' rules and just stick to that set. That way there's no need to apply different rules in each state and their customers get the best level of protection wherever they live. They can then also drop the specious argument about extra costs to meet each different set of rules. But then again, maybe they aren't really interested in consumers' privacy and data protection...
"or whether they need a Microsoft account"
It's hard enough to get past the personal setup of a new Windows computer without falling into the trap of setting up a Microsoft account. I know I don't want or need one, but how many people can't find their way past all the traps they set when you run the computer for the first time?
A simple slide switch on the fob to turn it off would be a good start, so that signal amplification can't be used to unlock and start the car. If the car goes out of range of the fob it should cut out and drift to a halt, and maybe lock all the doors, lock the brakes, sound the horn and flash the hazard lights. Maybe even remove keyless starting altogether - is there really a compelling reason why the driver can't take a key out of their pocket and turn it in a lock to start the vehicle? I'm not interested in buying a car that can't have this feature disabled, or preferably not fitted in the first place.
I spotted a local infrastructure support company laying fibre in the Openreach ducts opposite my house, so I went out to ask them who they were doing it for. Found out it was for YouFibre, so I called them straight away and booked an installation for the following week. Everything is working well and I've ditched BT FTTC and landline and ported my number. Getting double the download and seven times the upload for half the price!
When I first moved in 19 months ago I ordered the BT installation and it took about a month before the landline was installed with temporary internet access over 4G with poor signal coverage in this rural edge of village area.
As much as I love Concorde, it isn't the solution to the problems on Earth right now. It probably spent more years in development than in actual commercial operation. It cost too much to develop, too much to fly in and was never a commercial success that paid its way. What we do gain from projects like these though, is the developments that come out of solving the problems that arise - new materials, new designs, new methodologies, etc.
Space is an even bigger source of new ideas, new technologies, new techniques and should be encouraged. It has helped us learn about and prove the state of the planet, far more than faster holiday trips for the rich ever could.
What we don't see in IT is the adherence to standards and shared goals. It has become a competitive market that makes a few people very rich, who then go on to protect their gains instead of sharing them - both money and ideas.
Yes - it has always bugged me that there's nothing databases or spreadsheets (from my experience, anyway) that deals with time as time - it's always a date part. I deal a lot with elapsed time data, time differences, call lengths, recording lengths, etc. I have to add these up and I don't want 1970-01-12 16:27:23 as the result - I want it in hours, minutes and seconds. So I have to create my own functions and store the results as strings to stop them being reformatted as dates.
I log into my banking app in the morning, see that some payments have gone out and log out. 10-15 minutes (or even hours) later, the app tells me that the same payments have gone out. I log in to transfer money to/from my saving account and log out. An alert pops up to tell me that I have received that amount in my account. And so on, ad infinitum...
I started my professional programming life using CCP/M on some ICL hardware - each hosting 3 users per PC on colour terminals. The 3 ICL PCs were networked with co-ax (100Kb or1Mb?) around the site. We programmed with the Dataflex 3GL using WordStar as the editor writing a stock and repair control system for a large workshop. Must have been around 1985/6 time. I remember having the rebuild the OS for changes in hardware and peripherals, go through an on-screen questionnaire for each item to set the parameters. Kids don't know how easy things are now!