Posts by a_yank_lurker 4138 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2013
"I'm surprised there isn't more bad acting by employees." there probably is but if you keep a low enough profile its hard to get caught. It's not apparent how he got caught but my guess some the information he sold got used in a civil case (divorce possibly) which caught someone's attention. They started to ask how the private dick got the information and the dick rolled.
It's not the amount of any one settlement but death by a thousand pricks. A few grand scattered around will add up over time plus the internal cost of having someone handle the issue. Also, a steady drip of stories like this does not help Slurp's reputation any and might inspire more suits.
@ Ron 10 - Since it is the user's kit, they have the right to use any compatible supplies with it. This is a variation of using DRM to prevent users from using third party supplies. Now if the feral prosecutors were really doing their jobs they would be hammering Slurp and HP on various criminal charges.
@bombastic_bob - The deal breaker for me was when Slurp decided a W8.1 dual boot laptop (Linux Mint) had to have Winbloat10 aka the Abomination installation files downloaded. The download settings on 8.1 were generic. After that episode, Internet connections for all Winbloat installs has been disabled. This is the crap that malware uses not a supposedly reputable OS. This begs the question what else very dodgy if not illegal actions is Slurp doing with the Abomination.
It seems some semi-bright spark has figured out that no matter where the drug deal is arranged the goods have to be delivered somehow. The weakest links in the entire dark web is the delivery of the goods and to lesser extent payment. Both require a paper trail to execute such as a delivery address or wire transfer (even if the final payment is via bitcoins).
"Big Whatever" is buzzword bingo to group vaguely related ideas together for the PHBs and MBAs (Mostly Brainless A**holes) to babble about. Usually the term covers concepts, issues, and solutions that been around for decades in some guise. But remember most business marketing is not aimed at engineers and technical staff but the PHBs and MBAs.
Also, I think the original work makes a statistical mistake. The average breach may cost X but what is the distribution of X and what is the percentage X to company revenues and its distribution. Also, most shoplifting and billing fraud does not affect the stock price either and people know it is a real problem. The other issue with computer security is some information is legally protected so if it gets out in the wild you are the hook for real nasty lawsuits for the real victims.
@WolfFan - I think the first post is saying why don't people demand Slurp get its act together. And if the option to ditch Winbloat is available, take it if Slurp refuses to fix its internal problems and stupidities. I doubt Slurp will fix anything internally unless forced by users leaving to do so and we will continue to see problems with peripheral devices not working.
Do not confuse a company that provides useful services such as Uber, Lyft, or AirBnB with Twitter. The former are businesses that try to match potential suppliers with consumers. Uber and Lyft are essentially taxi dispatch services and are thus potentially useful to anyone. Twitter's "services" are more ephemeral in that one does not need them and many will never find them useful.
Twitter primary audience is narcissists who have nothing better to do than to spew gibberish. Facebook is a different beast is connecting people worldwide with some real interaction, even if it is via text, photos, and videos. Facebook has some real value to offer to anyone while Twitter has a very limited value to most. Facebook potentially can have everyone in the world as a user even if most are only talking to family and friends. Twitter seems to have a much lower upper limit for users because of its fundamental pointlessness.
The blue screwup has a long history of blunders and stupidities that they have to reinvent themselves every few years so there are new suckers to leach off of. Also, if the Aussie government procurement is anything like the ferals what you tend to get is overpriced, third rate work (if you are lucky) form a vendor that is more competent at navigating the bidding process than they are technically competent.
Der Dimbulb is classic PHB material. Grade changes are monitored and not that common. You might have enough to get need two hands to count for the entire year. So the professor will know who he sent in a grade change for. (I taught at KSU many years ago).
A pay-as-you-go model with no long term contract or commitment might work for some who value their customers. Several cellphone plans are pure pay-as-you-go and they seem to work to treat their customers like human beings. And a surprise, they have very good customer loyalty with much less churn and are very profitable. Never dealt with Red Hat but their support of Fedora and Centos shows they do value their users even the none paying ones.
Slurp could be the big loser because a month-to-month deal means they will need to work at customer loyalty.
Ultimately Slurp has to fix it in some manner. The problem is likely it will cause a lot of problems, money, and possibly customer goodwill to fix it. Refusing to outline how they fix it makes the users a well known, exploitable target. Slurp seems to be relying on how difficult they think flaw is to exploit; badly overestimating its difficulty to use.
Autonomous cars are not ready for the public at this point. They are purely engineering test beds. What many automakers are doing is incorporating bits they believe will help improve safety such as automatically braking under certain situations. A couple of reasons for this: autopilot systems are still too buggy for the public and public is not quite ready for them. Pretty much everyone who is working on an autonomous car has said that the technology is not ready but we are "close". It may be like nuclear fusion which is always "a few years" in the future for 50 years+.
One of the problems with an autonomous vehicle is that vehicles can have a useful life of 15 years+ with proper maintenance, a little luck, and moderate use. Owners will expect similar results with an autonomous car. Many advertise that many owners get this kind of life so expectation is there. So the computer systems must work for the entire mechanical life of the vehicle which often will be 20 years.
Too name a driver assist package "Autopilot" is marketing stupidity at best if not risking a regulatory investigation for false claims.
ISO rules were not very strict about how one fulfilled them but generally described what was required from my time running an ISO QA program. The problem was how many chose to implement them with long tedious wordy manuals. I remember the auditor suggesting that our top level document often could be a few pages long - he was pushing for a one page document if possible. The rest of the program would have enough detail to make sure one produced the quality products you intended, etc.
I do not know much about Comic Relief's finances but many charities have minimal (poorly) paid staff and actually try to do good with very limited resources. This does not mean there a no "charities" that are not fraudulent because there are. But before attacking a specific charity review their financial statements and see how much overhead they have.
Many good charities use investment income to fund much of their ongoing activities. This is normal prudent behavior if you plan to do something in the future. Attacking a charity for having a long term survival strategy shows a lack of understanding and a failure to research the charity.
The real question to ask any charity is not about their investment but how much of their overall budget goes out to help. Some have very low overhead expenses and spend most money doing good while others seem to be more about posturing and enriching the leaders.
The suspicion has been the Swedish charges are something that looks strong enough for a trial. The idea is to destroy his credibility by using a very public trial where the actual conviction is irrelevant. While the US hates him, so do others because Wikileaks has been a pain in their sides and embarrassing them on a regular basis.
" where are the days where a dev would optimize his code for reasonable memory usage ?" For most common applications being memory frugal is not valuable for the time it takes to tweak the code. What is more valuable is programmers' time both to initially write the code and to maintain it. So code that is easier to understand and follow wins out over highly optimized code. If this means a few extra megs of ram it probably will not be noticed by most users.
Also, remember the mantra the cheapest upgrade to a computer is to add more memory particularly to a desktop.
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