Posts by Zippy´s Sausage Factory 1465 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2018
That latter one of course being an alien concept to the beancounters and general manglement sometimes, who only see headcount and not knowledge or experience (let alone capability and competence).
This is why there seems to be an uptick in job adverts that require ten years experience and a PHD for an "entry level" position...
This is coming for all datacentres eventually, as their power requirements increase. There's a limit to how much electric you can generate and how much the grid can handle. And since governments don't own the national grids anymore there's precious little investment in them because they want a short-term profit rather than a long term gain (cf. Thames Water).
As for me, I'll just sit here with my popcorn, watching the show. (Until they turn off the power to my popcorn maker, obviously).
Also, we need a popcorn icon, really.
"The move leaves users with the option to carry on as normal, remove Teams from licenses and enjoy a small discount, or buy it as a standalone product."
You mean there is an actual discount... it's not the same price? Or even more expensive? I'm sure there must be much wailing and gnashing of teeth at Redmond of late.
"Maybe if they were as open with the customers as with the investors we wouldn't be *quite* so frustrated at their pricing practises."
They can't possibly be open with customers, because if customers knew upfront they were basically going to be milked as cash cows forever, they'd all have an "everything must be free* software" policy.
* something something GNU something something Richard Stallman
Firefox users clearly weren't included in the complaint and would have to file separately. Unless, of course, Firefox includes more robust protection that would have prevented Google collecting the information in the first place - somebody with more knowledge of Firefox's security provisions than I possess would be able to answer that.
Microsoft are probably looking at this and panicking. I imagine they're looking at a RISC-V version of Windows right now. Because I'd say it represents a threat to their business worldwide - if China transitions to Linux, that ups the bar for everyone else.
I can imagine the conversations in boardrooms now: "Why are China so much cheaper?" "They use Linux and open source, not Microsoft" "Then why aren't we doing that?"
(The icon I need is probably somewhere between "hmm" and "wild speculation", so I'll play it safe and go with this one)
The whole idea of Active Directory was to finish crushing Novell. Now that Novell Directory Services has basically ceased to exist in any meaningful way, they are trying to tie Entra into Azure so tightly that in order to do enterprise authentication you have to use Azure. That's pretty plain to see.
The one thing I'm surprised about is that having had a recognisable - if not particuarly good - brand name in "Active Directory", they throw it away for a name that sounds like it would suit an off-brand line of "marital aids".
"Similarly, they've introduced the replacement for VBA in Excel. It's crap and hard to run on multiple PCs due to the security"
To be fair, that's what they seem to have been trying to do to VBA recently anyway. I know if they pull the plug on it at our place there will be howls of protest.
The second you do business in a country, you're subject to that country's laws. The USA are rather sticklers on that point, as are the EU - rightly so.
You can easily argue that acquiring the personal information of a person living in country X can only have been obtained directly or indirectly from country X, thus rendering you liable to the jurisdiction of the privacy laws in that country, whether you like it or not.
The fact of the matter is that California privacy laws, Canadian privacy laws, the GDPR et al are going to apply to anyone who does business with anyone who lives in the country where those laws are on the books, and corporations will eventually realise that they have to pay attention to that and obey those rules.
We all know this was some middle manager who thought they was clever. They got asked about the opt outs and said "why do we want people to opt out? Just ignore that, we want to reach everyone, nobody cares about the opt outs". (I suspect there may have been some "do as you're told" and "who's the boss here" involved as well)
They are allowed to show adverts. They're not allowed to process personally identifying information to serve those adverts without the users' consent.
The intent of the law is that there should be several options: tailored adverts, generic adverts or fee and no adverts. Facebook don't want to offer the middle ground.
"Our technology is not designed or licensed for use against human rights activists and journalists,"
Because we all know that every user adheres strictly to the exact letter of the terms and conditions of any End User Licence Agreement and never deviates from this strict compliance policy by even an iota.
Not.
The only solution I can see is to break Microsoft up. Four companies - one gets Azure and no software products. One gets Office, nothing else, and they're not allowed to do any cloud services. One gets Windows, nothing else, no cloud. Last company gets everything else, no cloud services, no Windows, no Office.
None of the four are allowed to share staff. They're not allowed to buy software directly from each other but most go through the channel. The other 3 are strictly forbidden from using the first's cloud services for any purpose.
Draconian? Yes. Will it make anyone feel any better about things? Doubtful. Will it solve anything? Probably not. Will any politician dare to do it? Of course not, Micros~1 will donate far too much to make sure it never happens.
Because cloud! It saves money because we don't have to pay techies! And we don't know where our data's physically hosted so we can use that as an excuse on data protection enquiries*! Everybody wins!
* didn't Facebook actually do this once, I seem to remember?
I used Partition Magic extensively for many years. What a great piece of software that was. Think I still have disk images of my copy around, although the original floppies are long lost by now.
I once amazed a friend by shrinking his C drive enough to create a new 140MB partition and free up another 120MB of space on his C drive. Good times.
Virtual beer to you for the trip down memory lane, and the heads up on the new version of gparted. -->
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