Posts by Buzzword 1030 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2010
"Google takes no responsibility to update customer devices, and refuses to take responsibility to update their devices..."
Microsoft did the same with Lumia devices running Windows Phone 7.x: no upgrades to Windows 8. They really can't claim some sort of moral high ground here.
I'd like the amount to pop up on the screen, together with green and red approve/reject buttons. The most aggravating thing about contactless is that you often don't see how much you're being charged; or that it is shown, but only on a tiny screen which isn't well-positioned or well-lit. You have to trust that the person operating the till correctly typed in £1.95 and not £19.95; or that they only charged you for your beer and not for somebody else's whole round.
For my https-only server, this works:
curl -I -v https://my.server.name/realfile.png -H "Range: bytes=0-18446744073709551615"
(The file requested must actually exist.)
Before patching it replied "HTTP/1.1 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable"
After patching it replied "HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request"
People aren't fungible. The ex-Microsoftees are jaded middle-aged workers, accustomed to working 9 to 5 on a decent salary with decent healthcare provision. Companies would much rather hire naive young workers, willing to work 24/7 for peanuts and minimal healthcare coverage. If you were a CEO, which would you choose?
So you've developed a new product, one which (in the current storage environment) is "new" for about three months. You sell out quickly to a big company, take the money, and run; leaving them with a rapidly-depreciating product and no staff who know how it works. After a year the product is discontinued, support ends, and customers are shafted. IBM tries to persuade customers to "upgrade" to the latest shiny storage product and this time the customer tells them where to shove it. Neither IBM's shareholders nor their customers benefit. Meanwhile the startup's founders rinse and repeat, while laughing all the way to the bank.
"Use more than one technology: A single vendor cannot cover everything and represents a weak link in your security chain."
For security products perhaps; but the inverse is true for the rest. If you only run e.g. Windows, your network will only be exposed to its vulnerabilities; whereas if half the office has Apples or *nix variants, your network is exposed to all their foibles too. Same applies if e.g. half the company uses Chrome and the other half uses Firefox.
Unfortunately one of the biggest bottlenecks on pre-3G speeds is the HTTPS handshake setup time. By the time client and server have agreed on encryption protocol and keys, you've already used several seconds.
It's not too bad for apps, but it is particularly problematic for secure websites which grab resources from many different sites: each host needs a new HTTPS handshake, and you can't have any HTTP or the browser complains about insecure content. Without 3G you really need a browser like Opera Mini which renders content remotely.
This can only work if there's just one robot, and preferably just for the manager. You can drive around the remote office, see who is in, see who is chatting to who, and cut in for a quick chat yourself. But once your employees have robots too, the system falls apart. Are they really at their desk, or is that just where they last parked their robot? How can you tell if they're chatting on the phone, if you can't see the handset glued to their ear? You can't even tell if they're actually working or just surfing Robot News Daily. Ultimately the damn thing is going to spend most of its time parked at its desk, so it's a waste of money.
"... Apple has no problem finding our phone number [...] when we're ABOUT TO write some bad news about them ..."
How on earth do they know you're about to write a bad story? Are they in cahoots with the NSA? Do you write all your stories on Apple computers which have a built-in backdoor to Cupertino and a keyword detector? ("fanboi" must set it off)
It depends on who you are trying to hide from.
If you intend to commit crimes in one country (e.g. the USA), then it makes sense to buy a "spyproof" phone from a country which doesn't have a Five-Eyes style intelligence-sharing agreement with that country (e.g. Russia). Even if the Russians have hacked your phone, they won't tell the Americans what you're up to, for fear of divulging their intelligence capabilities.
It's nothing to do with the mobile providers. Do you expect the Highways Agency to service your car too?
What about people who have wifi-only tablets, no mobile provider involved? It's up to the manufacturer to provide support (or not). That's the risk you take when buying hardware made by a company with a poor reputation for support.
What are the consequences of treating it as realistic? It's not global warming: we don't all have to cycle and knit our own shirts and recycle hemp nappies. In fact there's pretty much no way to defend from such an event, short of building Dutch-style dikes (levees) around the entire coastline. Which isn't going to happen.
Without consequences, there is no cause for concern. It's as harmless as the movie 2012 or War of the Worlds.
It's called eating your own dogfood. If a private company complains that the employment legislation is too onerous, or that another increase to employers' national insurance will mean layoffs, then the government can just stick their fingers in their ears and ignore it. But when the same message comes from your own side, from schools and hospitals and the civil service, then it's harder to ignore.
According to some stats I dredged up, Pinterest's workforce are 50% white and 42% Asian (there's no further breakdown into Indian, Chinese, Filipino, etc.). Those figures are remarkably close to the figures for San Francisco as a whole. Assuming the company mostly hires local workers, where is the problem?
Forget the browser - it's the app store that needs back-porting to Windows 7. Look at Google - they don't own the operating system, yet they've managed to get their app store (Chrome) installed on millions of PCs worldwide. It even works on Windows XP. Microsoft haven't a clue about strategy.
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