identify and remove mundane tasks
Did they try asking the engineers before spending millions on CONsultants (A portmanteau of "con" and "insult")
1194 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
I'm not defending Amazon, but based on the blurry "evidence" screenshot posted in the article - the other sellers price is higher anyway.
And Amazon do make the effort to show alternative sellers prices for a specific product, as well as comparable products, after you've selected a product from their (crap) search results.
(I mean, search for hand SANITIZER, then select a hand SOAP displayed in the "featured" results?)
When the tougher CISA rules are up and running, the SEC rule can be lifted.
So what's the problem if an established organization can provide some interim protection for the shareholders it represents? Especially if it has the side-effect of protecting others, such as customers personal data.
Mall cops may not be "real" cops, but they serve a purpose.
If you hop over the guardrails surrounding a cesspool, you're literally in deep shit.
The problem is not the guardrails being easily circumvented They're there to stop workers falling in accidentally, not to stop crazy people. It's the cesspool being accessible by crazies/idiots.
I thought we learned these lessons in the early days of the Internet?
That's an odd use of the word "investment", unless printer hardware is a loss-leader to get users to buy consumables. And in that case, I'd use the word "con", making customers think they're getting a good deal when the cost per page is a rip off.
The IP argument is pretty weak too, the ink formulation or delivery system may be IP but they're not checking for that, they're checking for a HP-branded chip. If I want to put cheap ink in MY printer and run the risk of wrecking it, that's between me and the ink supplier.
Read has been CEO for over 4 years, after the issue became public knowledge. Maybe not his mess, but as CEO he should been digging in to it and ready with answers.
I'm slightly confused by the difference between the Parliamentary Committee and the Statutory Inquiry. A summary of the evidence for the Inquiry should be good enough for the Committee.
(A cynic might say a Parliamentary Committee is for the government to be Seen To Be Doing Something, and a Statutory Inquiry is to bury the issue [As per "Yes, Minister"]).
I'm also uncomfortable with the Government rushing through special laws to address this. Why not just pardon everyone, have the Post Office repay all fines/clawbacks etc. and bring new prosecutions if appropriate. Not got the evidence to prosecute any more? Tough!
Dell are selling the tools in the AI gold rush - the proven way to get rich from a fad.
However, to take his analogy to the ozone hole - What we did was stop using CFCs. Is he saying we'll stop using "AI" once there's overwhelming evidence it's bad for the human race (Hallucinations, power usage, etc.) ?
It brought tears to my eyes. A fast, responsive, intuitive OS that did its job as a platform rather than trying to be a "user experience".
Good contrast and clear borders between windows - Ah, the good old days.
All those principles lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to switch off.
The SEC's remit is confined to Securities fraud, it's not that they're heartless. And they can go after company officers, whereas patients can only sue the company (which promptly went bankrupt after being exposed).
It sounds like a number of employees were complicit in this scam, but I don't know what criminal charges could be brought against individual employees.
Don't be naive. Want WYSIWIG? Graphics and print drivers. Want a mouse or USB devices? Drivers.
Windows has been a great platform for unifying and abstracting apps from the hardware level. And credit to Microsoft/Windows/MS Office for standardising control keys and options.
But back to the topic of the article - what has Microsoft done for us since then?
(Commence corrections & downvotes in ...3.2.1...)
You jest - but slave owners tended to take care* of their "property", feeding and housing them so as not to waste their "investment".
Contrast that with free workers - Free to starve, live on the streets, be fired etc. as employers push down real wages.
* Obviously I'm not endorsing slavery or making a serious comparison, just pointing out that free workers can be cheaper to employ.
Once had to remove a server from its rack that had been installed at an angle - the right hand side was one hole lower than the left.
I don't know how they managed to get the bolts in, but I ruined my favourite ratchet screwdriver getting them out. If I'd had an angle grinder, I'd have used it on the previous engineer.
I bought a mid-range laptop that came with both Vista and XP pre-installed and the ability to switch. I tried using Vista, but found the UI so slow and UAC so intrusive (Not quite "You moved your mouse. Please enter the Administrator password to make the change") that I gave up on the experiment after a couple of hours. Fortunately the laptop vendor made it easy to switch and delete the Vista installation
The only other time I saw it was with a friends laptop that he'd persisted with, but hadn't installed any updates on - Usually just switching it off when he couldn't do what he wanted to do. Leaving it running for a couple of days to catch up on updates brought it back to a semi-usable state.
SAP are ending support, not a licence to use the app or the ancient platform it's based on.
Though it would be dangerous for a hospital to continue to use software without an (extended) support contract. The only question is if the extended support contracts are troubleshooting-only or custom & general release patches.
What happened to the "long tail" theory? It costs virtually nothing to store content and the provider pays royalties to the content owner when movie is streamed by a customer.
I guess each content owner wants their own subscription model, which would be fine if it was a fraction of the price of e.g. Netflix, to reflect their limited content.
In a ridiculous related example, Amazon Prime wanted £2 to stream an episode of Firefly, so I bought the Collectors edition series on DVD for £3, watched them all, then gave the DVD to a friend to screw Amazon over again XD
Computers could certainly enhance a paper file, assuming the contents are filed properly. I would hope that system has a chronological summary of the patient history but also allows
- Searching for any term in the file, e.g. "hip". Easy in a digitized file, not so easy in a paper file..
- Linking an Episode, e.g. a broken hip treated in a hospital plus outpatient physiotherapy sessions plus disability assessment.
- Selecting an item, then paging backwards/forwards through related OR unrelated pages. (e.g. You had a fall, but also have low blood sugar. Hmm, could they be related? The human brain is great at making correlations, computers not so good)
- Side-by-side comparison of two pages, e.g. blood test results, to see what has changed. Maybe even highlight changes or anything out of the norm.
That's just off the top of my head, and with little knowledge of current practices. Hopefully those involved are way ahead of me!
(It occurs to me that any CRM system should have those features, so the wheel doesn't have to be reinvented for each use case)
A good point - The end-users got an application menu rather than a command prompt, so it was someone with root privileges wot dun it.
`ls | grep` is also an unlikely command, but that's what I found when examining "/u/grep"
As an apology, I'll offer one of my own "Who, me?"s [1]: `last | grep reboot` [2]
Except I inexplicably missed typing "grep", and "reboot" doesn't ask whether you really meant it...
[1] I make a new-and-interesting major mistake about once every 7 years. I'm overdue another one..I've warned my boss they really should fire me before that happens!
[2] Other, safer commands are available, e.g. `who -b` or even `last reboot`
How many people does it take to make a logic bomb?
- A systems programmer who puts their utilities in /u and makes /u the first directory in the search path, as some of the utilities have the same name as (and supersede) system utilities.
- A user who typos `ls > grep` in /u, instead of using "|"
No real problem so far. /u/grep isn't executable, so is ignored.
- A systems administrator who decides everything in /u should be executable...
It's surprising how much of a Unix system depends on "grep" and will fail if you break that utility!
Maybe they're DARTS, aimed to deflect Earth from reaching the rich galactic civilization...and spoiling it. Or Teasers, drunk rich alien kids who override the safety systems in their ships so they can buzz humans.
There may be aliens out there, but it seems unlikely they would leave evidence.
Douglas Adams nailed it on a larger scale:
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
My team is spread around the globe. So are our internal users ("customers"). We tend to deal with the "customers" in our own time zone, but in any given week I'm likely to be working with the US, Europe and Asia. My manager is on another continent. Being in the local office 9-5 will not help me "engage" with them, it will make me less flexible in my working hours to meet the business need.
Management in a multinational company needs to understand that, and adapt. Perhaps if IBM RA'd the management dinosaurs then they would see more productivity?