Posts by Solomon Grundy 901 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Nov 2007
There are already plenty of laws that require the consumer to pay taxes on items purchased online, but they can't be enforced. The States enacting these types of laws are just outsourcing their revenue collection points to retailers without having to pay for it. Sales taxes are silly anyway and ought to be done away with, but that'll never happen here because everyone prefers having their money eaten away 15 cents at a time.
Nobody wants to work during traditional "off" hours - including the parcel delivery people. For the pizza business it's different because their target market IS the people at home, but for most people, they want their time off too. They'd probably work "non-standard" hours but they'd expect extra pay; wouldn't you?
Maybe I'm biased but the Garmin units I've used for years are not too expensive and you get free lifetime map updates, including construction bypasses. They work well out in the country (TomTom fails miserably at that here in the U.S.) and even better in urban areas. It is cheaper to buy upfront with free maps/updates than pay all the time: especially if you are going into a big city.
So if the student sold a stolen laptop to the teacher; who was the original thief and why wasn't it reported sooner? Shouldn't the person who originally owned the device have reported it stolen and the "LoJac" service have already located it prior to it being acquired by the teacher? The device has been through at least two parties counting the teacher.
So either the location service has failed miserably or the student and the original owner are in this together right?
In the U.S. anyway, a transaction between two parties who know each other (peers, colleagues, friends, etc...) that is made in good faith puts the crime back on the thief (student in this case). In a professional relationship like this one the teacher has every right to expect the student to be dealing with her in good faith and for a low value/non-titled item like a computer she will not have been expected to question the price or the even check for a serial number.
We have LOTS of stupid laws here but there are some pretty good ones too: Many of them still respect the basic social contract.
Allowing scientists to interpret their findings, especially with a sensitive topic like this, would be bad. Organizations like CERN do a lot more than studies like this and making a statement on what their findings mean could jeopardize their funding.
It's really too bad that science has gotten to the point where scientists aren't allowed to speak out regarding their research unless they are paid to do so by a 3rd party. I got into science to explore the world but now I'm just disappointed; as are so many of my co-workers and peers. Science has been raped by politicians and large companies. Seeing what is happening now makes it easier to understand how the "dark ages" happened.
The HP PC business makes a lot of good money. It just doesn't generate the margins that software does. HP is making this move to ramp up shareholder value; not to actually increase the value of the company. If HP wanted to make long term moves they'd go back to driving their business through engineering.
Not any more. Under Jobs, Apple was actually led (which means pushing and lots of yelling at staff). Without Jobs to do that the company will go back to what it was the first time they fired him. He did a GREAT job making the company what it is today but no one can be expected to fill that turtleneck. Apple will now run itself into the ground misinterpreting customer desires and making shitty products; just like before. Oh well. I never bought anything but my 2ns gen iPod from them anyway.
I do think it's kinda sad that he appears to be leaving because of his health. I wish he was just saying f*(k it and moving to his own island with lots of topless women and a monkey butler instead of dying.
But I don't think it's just budget cutting exercises. Somewhere tech crossed over a line that took it into "specialist only" territory. Now anything that has to do with computers can be better handled by an outsider; which is bullshit and any IT professional knows it.
The blame falls with IT itself: I think almost everyone it IT (myself included) has been guilty of overstating the complexity of things. Whether to impress someone for a bit more salary/hourly rate, make a sale, or save themselves a bit of work; and it's screwed us all. The IT community as a whole has succeeded in scaring everyone outside the community of "computer stuff". That's why tech companies that make things that "just work" are doing so well right now, even though the end user is getting a sub-standard product that really can't do much. People are scared of technology (including managers/bosses) whose success is rated on the success of what they spend money on - they are scared and don't want to take what they see as risk.
IT preaches FUD but has failed to recognize the maturing nature of IT as a whole. IT has succeeded in integrating itself into almost everyone's life but hasn't gotten past the stage of needing an "outside super specialist" to make it go. Jobs like the one in this article SHOULD be handled internally but the decision makers have been scared off of that. It's not too late to change that but the overall attitude of people in IT must accept and adjust to the fact that the everyman and the people in charge are tired of hearing complicated tech speak. That's why decision makers like flow charts. It makes very complex things easy for them to understand. Their jobs force their minds to be focused elsewhere on things they view as just as complex as our "geek stuff". The IT community can do a lot to help themselves if they'll just accept that that they are now 'part' of a team and not the whole team. It will let us keep jobs in house with steady salaries and ideally move IT towards not being the whipping boy who works 60-80 hours a week.
OSS is developed and given away for free. That's what it is. The products are great but as long as people are giving it away for free why not use it? This is the old cow/milk - girl/sex argument and there's no way to win it (unless you're getting the milk or the sex for free). Either give it away free and have everyone look at you like a slut or charge for it and put some money in your pocket. The only 3rd option is not to play the game.
You've got to understand that everyone has a boss to report to. Whether it's a techy-goobldy-today's-greatest-thing or getting a deal done and money in the bank to make sure your paycheck clears.
Put any technology on the spot and show me how it will MAKE money. Most techies get hung up on things that SAVE money or make things more efficient. Show me a technology that will put the techies out of work is what they are really driving towards but I hear lots of bitching when I make people redundant because of the technology.
IT is a cost center. It costs money. If you can't make what you have work you've probably been made redundant but something better.
Yes there is a cost of creation, but it isn't paid to Contributors. OSS isn't very good at the 'cost' part. A HUGE community of talented people contributes but very few of them see any tangible result from it. They contribute and other people take and make money from it. In a business most OSS projects would be losers overall if the cost of creation is taken into account.
That being said, very few tech people are business savvy. Very few business people are tech savvy. That's why it takes lots of people to make a successful business. It's really not fair to knock on numbers you don't really understand.
Rockets and spacecraft fail. If you consider how few launches (of anything) have actually been made, the success rate is about what you'd expect from a highly complex system full of electronics and explody things. A key factor is a lanuch is rarely "standard" - things are different for each launch which makes it exponentially harder to identify failures. Until there is a viable financial reason to send things into space, getting there will be science: Very expensive experiments undertaken by governments and rich people.
I'm not an open source advocate by any means. By and large I think the best part of OSS is that other people are doing good work for free.
That being said though; Every software project has tons of bugs and decisions have to be made whether to work on improving functionality or fixing rarely encountered issues. These decisions have to be made with any project, commercial or OSS, and I challenge you to show me a problem that wasn't fixed out of shear laziness in any major product.
The OSS guys do a pretty darn good job of producing some pretty great software for free. That's their decision so, whatever. No reason to hate on them. Just use their work and profit from it or don't use it. The OSS community overall demonstrates project management skills that almost any big company should like to emulate.
So what if Facebook is building a personal profile of you and selling it? You said that was OK when to agreed to their terms of service. Didn't you? Huh? You didn't? Did you not read the agreement you signed? Why not?
People expect great things to be available to them at no cost. Just because it's online doesn't mean its costing nothing. Being able to "socialize" with your friends is expensive. Someone has to pay. Who's it going to be? You?
Of course it is you. YOU are what is being sold. You agreed to sell all your information and buying habits when you signed on to the 'great' service that is being offered for 'free'. In exchange for making new 'friends' and growing your 'circles' you sold your identity. You sold your soul. Did you not understand that?
No. You probably didn't. Very few individuals understand the contracts they are agreeing to when they sign up for new online services. Hundreds, even thousands of people review each update to the TOS for major sites just to make sense of them, and even then there is rarely a consensus. At the end of the day "if you aren't paying for it, you are the product".
You are not entitled to socialize with people using someone's service. Someone has to get paid for delivering that 99.5% reliable service. You've either got to pay with your $$$, or pay with your online identity, or not use the services.
It isn't too hard to not use those services. I have a real life (IRL for geeks) social circle made up of real people that I can poke - one way or the other...
Why all the bubbub? Sure there are technical issues that I don't understand, but that's what tech pros get paid to sort out - so no big deal there.
It seems to me that the marketing industry has the most work cut out for it. They're afraid they're going to lose the 'easy' ability to market to the ENTIRE WORLD!!! using the .com domain. The reality of the situation was never that way though - they never did effectively market to the entire world. They marketed to a few select language groups and now that there may be more of those groups (native language domains) they'll have to pay attention to these "new markets" as well. Big brands are already recongnized across language barriers but there aren't too many of brands that scale. The big money in marketing is selling to medium and small businesses and one of the big marketing sales is "sell to the whole world with our .com campaign strategy".
It seems like an opportunity to me. More refined sales options to clients. But like I said. I guess I don't get it.
They've been using touch screens with randomized keyboard layouts for quite some time for entry into high secure facilities. This was done to get around "UV attacks" where "normal light invisible 'goo'" was placed on the users fingers then the thief came behind with a UV light source to illuminate the pressed keys. Also to help prevent social engineering attacks - which have been around a really long time but are just getting their cool name in the last few years.
That being said - nobody was using the UV attack (at least that we know of. Dum dum dum...) it was a precaution because not too long ago security research wasn't as easily available as it is today and when plausible new threats did arrive they were addressed. Now there is so much security research available no one can keep up: But if you fail you get tons of bad press and lots of visits to court. At what point does something truly constitute a threat?
You've pointed out the biggest issue in mass market retailing! How many computers do manufacturers think they can sell to a given person? Most five year old computers get people to their porn and email and that's pretty much all they are used for. Spending hundreds of dollars for no improving experience is not what people do when they don't have a lot of extra money to spend.
The 3k figure for TV use is generally considered the high water mark and is used as a tool to negotiate with. Real world payments for TV usage for stolen images are usually about $250 (US obviously) for still photos and $600 for video less than 20 seconds long.
No professional photographer thinks most any single image is worth 3k, and neither do the courts. If that was the case photographers would be living the high-life snapping a few dozen images a year. It's very true that big companies steal peoples photos all the time and they should have to pay for them, but to expect a a huge payout is silly.
He's actually a real journalist. He goes to press conferences, asks questions and gets responses from industry groups and companies and generally does a lot of journalism stuff. I'd say he is far more active in that regard than many staffers at larger publications whose only differentiation is the fact they still use trees to report their stories.
I often disagree with Andrew's views on things as well, and his sometimes holier than thou writhing style tends to piss me off, but that doesn't take away from the fact the guy is actually going to events and participating in "the news" - unlike most bloggers who just sit in front of their computer and want to pretend they're on the pulse of things. Give credit where it is due. Andrew is a journalist.
There was a long period of time when Apple wouldn't talk to El Reg. They were not on good terms at all. The Register pissed off Apple so badly they wouldn't invite them to press conferences or reply to their messages. They really can't be accused of kissing anyone's ass. They even hit on their advertisers (sometimes). They're pretty fair in Biting the hand that feeds IT...
So many of us get hung up on technology differences that to daily users are a non issue. The fact the lot of us are making a living with a computer is largely due to IBM and their attempt to bring computing to the Everyman is largely forgotten. Microsoft, Apple, RedHat - they have all been built on the what IBM started.
started to "impose standards" there was nothing to know about personal computers. It was all new and the first people to the table set the standards.
I'm not sure you remember the "pre-computer in every house age". Going to the computer was something people did in labs and on TV. Searching for something online wasn't an option. Nobody really knew how PC's were going to change the world. What IBM attempted to do with the PC chnaged everything - they just sucked at marketing.
You also aren't getting the "no one has ever been fired for buying IBM" thing. Thirty years ago there was no other option. If you didn't buy IBM then you'd be lucky if the beige machines you bought didn't burn down the building; much less advance your business. Nothing else worked in the business world.
Very few of the small shops that are the foundation of most economies are PCI compliant. Even fewer know what PCI is (a joke) but you buy from them all the time. One online article and you're going to take your business elsewhere?
Companies pay their monies for card processing and card readers and that's fair. They purchased a product and they pay big recuring fees for service - they are offering YOU the ability to use plastic; because YOU think you are too good for cash. If a random person purchases something they expect big consumer protections but those same people fail to realize the businesses that make the world go round are people too. There is a HUGE disconnect in the world that thinks just because someone is selling something they are making big money. Most small businesses are happy just to make good on their employees pay checks. They aren't making lots of money because they "own a business". You go on ahead with your updated bits and do your part to fuck up the economy even more.
Most of the data was stored by a 3rd party marketing company. Presumably so the departments could access it at any time without running their own servers. Not sure why a marketing company would have that info though...
The marketing company seems to be the one at fault (for the U.S. departments anyway).
I reckon Apple have locked themselves into being a consumer products company. It won't be hard for sales people to bring that up either. Why would you buy your business software from a toy maker (or some such).
Every company has their niche and it's retail consumers for Apple. They shouldn't complain though, they seem to be doing pretty good with that group.
Yes. They are the ones being petty. What they deserve is a good old-fashioned ass kicking on the sidewalk. I think they got off light with a couple of temporary website outages.
I don't think releasing the details of the cops is helping though. Most of those guys are just dumb rednecks who probably really try to help society (hopefully anyway). I do believe that the hackers/scripters have a valid point though. Law enforcement is getting out of hand and has become a private army for large corporations.
If a mom & pop commerce site was DDOS'd do you think the federal law enforcement would be arresting suspects on your behalf? You'd be lucky if the cop you talked to even filed a report.
There is SCIENCE behind hiring practices for law enforcement officers. Part of that science strongly advocates hiring people who are not very good at original thinking and who quickly respond when their intelligence/power are threatened (or perceived as threatened).
The idea being that officers won't be as prone questioning orders or to being outsmarted by crooks. Really. The idea is that you hire somone so stupid they can't be out-stupided and who can't think for themselves. It's probably not a terrible theory but in practice far too many stupid violent thugs are the people who best fit the bill.
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