Posts by Peter 39 351 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2009
Too much water under the bridge with this Board ?!?!?!?
Really ?!?!
Steve, you're lucky the Board was as incompetent as it was or the water would have been a lot higher, and sooner.
Microsoft would be in better shape if you had been swept away in, say, 2002.
And immeasurably better had it not appealed the breakup order. But hindsight is 20/20.
Beancounters are beancounters. And security is a cost, with no upside.
It is very, VERY hard for IT folks to put up reasonable numbers for risk, exposure and the like. Beancounters know about buildings and fire risks, and accidents and cost of insurance against that, but nothing at all about risk and exposure for information systems.
In addition, much of the cost of breaches is NOT borne by the company. If your credentials were compromised at Target and your identity stolen - do you think they will compensate you for a couple of years of effort to straighten it out? No, they do a deal for "monitoring" at low cost to them, and this only alerts you after the fact that you have a problem. Nothing preventative at all.
So, try as they might, IT managers have little success in showing Boards the real cost of a breach (except in banks, I guess). And until that changes, Boards will spend less and less on security.
"That is, the most important reason that the tech companies aren't using Wall Street is that they don't seem to be very good at using Wall Street."
Not quite it. It's that "they seem to be very good at NOT using Wall Street".
There have been many deal in the last few years where Wall Street didn't bring much to the table but certainly took a lot off it.
No - it's actually pretty normal for Apple. You do know that they have "header police" that manage what goes into header files, the naming of functions and variables, and a lot more. They are very, very picky.
And even more so with changes to an interface after it has been publicly "released" and made available to developers. That's why some APIs are known but still not permitted for use on iPhones. If your app uses a "private" API then it will be rejected.
>sorry to burst the bubble but if Apple don't know the transaction values then they cannot audit for the 0.15% fee.
I would expect that the existing auditors of the financial institution will take on this task. It'll be spelled out in the agreement somewhere - it always is. Apple certainly isn't going to do any auditing itself.
>Apple is a publicly traded company. It has a >>fiduciary duty<< to its
>shareholders to maximize their return on investment.
This is widely believed but is actually untrue.
Apple certainly does have a fiduciary duty to its shareholders but is NOT required to maximize their return on investment. Tim Cook made that very, very clear at the recent shareholders meeting. He was quite angry about it - the only time he seems to have ever lost his "cool".
Yet another adherent of the Church of MarketShare.
Those who have paid even the slightest attention over the past few years know that Apple has about 70-80% of the profits (depends upon exactly when you measure), Samsung has 20-30% and all the others are inconsequential (a point here and there - no traction in the market at all).
I guess there a reason why this ...
"Apple products are for those who want looks over functionality and feel good about buying expensive crap simply because it's expensive"
... is posted by "AC" rather than an actual poster. But since he/she is the self-styled Anonymous Coward then ... reason is not present.
This has always annoyed me with work trips to US. "Hey TSA monkey (apologies for monkeys...) ...since there is a visa stamped on the passport, immigration officials above your paygrade have already deemed that I have valid reasons to travel here"
Would be easier on tourist visa...
Why is it you think that it's any different at Heathrow?
The "tourist visa" approach may seem tempting but is not without risk. I will leave it to you to balance the risk/reward but please be aware that if you run afoul of CBP then any future visits to the U.S. are likely to be painful, at best. If you're on B1/B2 then just be upfront about what you're doing and for how long. If it's not excessive then you should be fine (if not then please respond here)
This has NOT been "passed by Congress". That requires approval from both the House and the Senate. So far it has passed just the House.
I hope that the Senate approves it too but, as things stand, your headline-writers have allowed their wishes to distort the reality.
@AC: the penalty isn't really the problem, although it is a part. The central problem is twofold:
1. it's stupidly easy to spoof call-origin
2. the telcos have no incentive to "discipline" abusive callers. On the contrary, the telcos are happy for the huge call volumes to continue, as long as they can deny knowledge
So here's the solution (part of which I described in another post):
1. use the "automatic number identification" (800-service)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_identification
info to identify all calls
2. require all telcos to filter the Caller ID info supplied on their PBX trunks for "reasonableness". That is, the telco know what range of numbers is assigned to the trunk and a supplied number outside the range would be replaced by the main number for the trunk.
This won't solve the problem of international spam calls. But those do have non-trivial cost. All the one I have suffered (in the U.S.) seem to have been IP from "various Asian nations" that then enter the U.S. phone system at a local point. That is, they aren't "international phone calls" but "U.S. long distance calls" with a non-U.S. endpoint.
If we can do this then all the U.S.-based boiler rooms will go away, "Rachel" will retire to a beach somewhere, and international phone spam will have to contend with phone charges, and Caller ID.
I think this would be a good first step.
>Every spam call has the CallerID of a local unrelated legitimate business,
>so somebody else takes the hit.
>US phone calls come with zero authenticated information.
Actually, most calls seem to come from non-working numbers. But not all -- I have had several from an unfortunate taxi company in San Jose, and they're really, REALLY tired of their number being given out as the source of the spam.
Solving this needs action from FCC as well as FTC. That's because there IS authenticated information on the origin of calls. But it's not available to "regular punters". But the information IS available as part of "800" service in the U.S. and so enterprising folks have services that redirect your number to 800-service and then to your (hopefully unlisted) actual phone number. And the number you then get as "Caller ID" is the real, actual number of the caller. This number is supplied by the phone company and cannot be spoofed (AFAIK) in the way that happens to regular Caller ID. It's important that this number be correct for 800-service because the recipient pays for the call, and therefore the caller-info-data must be auditable. The 800-service info is separate from the Caller ID signaling.
So it's time for the FCC, which controls such things, to mandate that this info be available generally. The phone companies already have it and use it so the change would be relatively minor.
Of course, the Law of Unintended Consequences remain in effect so there will have to be attention paid to certain categories of call (think: battered women's shelter, etc) but these can be handled in a way similar to the way that people already get an unlisted phone number. I suggest that there would be a "substitute number" supplied that leads back to the phone company. If problems were reported against this number then the actual source would be available to law enforcement. So privacy of these people would be preserved but abuse of the phone system could readily be dealt with.
Why should 30% be a "magic number" ??
Truth is that the vertical (being an ISP, content distributor, content creator) is far worse than being a large horizontal (very big ISP, OR a very big content distributor, for example).
The only way this "merger" should be allowed to proceed is on the basis of join-then-split. Allow the merger and require the immediate separation of upper-level stuff (NBC, TV distribution etc) from lower-level things (being an ISP, providing pipes).
Once the ISP is out of the content business, the net neutrality issues fade away.
>But the minister is not sure that ICANN is ready for the job
How the heck would HE know ??
And this is what his Attorney General is up to ...
Attorney General's new war on encrypted web services
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/375286,attorney-generals-new-war-on-encrypted-web-services.aspx
Basically, you have to give up your SSL keys to the "authorities"
>Under the department's plan, "law enforcement, anti-corruption and national
>security agencies … [would be able] to apply to an independent issuing authority
>for a warrant authorising the agency to issue 'intelligibility assistance notices' to
>service providers and other persons".
"It was almost magical the way the PC came about with an operating system from us and hardware from IBM.
What does he mean - "almost magical" ? It WAS magical because, although IBM developed the hardware, Microsoft did not develop the OS. Bill just paid money and bought it.
Almost magical -- NOT
I can imagine the following scenario developing:-
1. MS releases its last XP update next month and soon thereafter the pile of exploits that malware miscreants have been hoarding starts to roll into new hacks.
2. After two months, MS releases a "one more thing" patch that squashes lots of them.
I don't know what BMW is up to with this. It's not as though it didn't have to license the details for the iPhone 4 cradle, is it ?
But the "BMW Apps" software and "iPod Integration" stuff is very poor. My iPod and the car audio fight at least once a week. It takes all sorts of voodoo to get it going again. And BMW refuses to acknowledge that there is any issue.
The groundhog said that winter would be with us for a while, and it will. Verizon will continue to "throttle" various types of use without actually discriminating directly against any one. "So sorry, capacity constraints" and the like.
FCC will have a go at new regulations but will soon find that carriers have made an end-run. So it will finally be forced to tell the industry that you can't be both a carrier and a value-added supplier and have the same rules apply to both. The rules are going to be different and, as usual, the devil's in the details.
But the current trajectory is unsustainable, with most people in the U.S. having only a single broadband service (and many with DSL, which usually isn't "broadband"). Since there is no choice, market forces cannot possibly work. So there must be regulation. With value-added services carried on top of broadband there is choice and there the market can pick winners and losers.
"Threshold of a Dream"
Yeah. I remember that.
More seriously, on the threshold, you can go either up or down. It's unusual of Microsoft marketing to leave the question so open, regardless of whether or not the engineering effort lives up to it.
Maybe reality has started to impinge upon Redmond ?
It all depends upon the evidence, m' friend.
And it seems that Apple has been mostly clean about patent infringement. Not completely by any means, but mostly. And some so many patents are (most unfortunately) vaguely written and cast a wide net, that isn't a bad track record.
For the most part, Apple doesn't do SEP patents so it seldom encounters the FRAND licensing issues that have bedeviled Samsung.
Apple has lot a few. But not any lately.
ILECs have for many years received special treatment, along the lines that Ma Bell received when she was the only one (with minor local exceptions).
Having enjoyed those for many years, ILECs seek to retain the bennies and ditch the responsibilities. They don't want to provide access to CLECs with their new systems, especially the fiber-based ones.
I don't care how ILECs provide their service - fiber, copper, IP, whatever - as long as they live up to their responsibilities.
It has been widely reported that this was T-Mobile's plan first, and was planned for announcement at CES.
Somehow AT&T heard about it and made their speedy announcement last week. Right from the start their move was labelled as "preemptive" which gives you the clue that it wasn't their original idea. And AT&T is doing it only against T-Mobile, while T-M accepts switchers from all three major carriers.
According to BMW, the white-and-blue logo isn't representative of an airplane propeller. Although I do admit that it does have a certain resemblance, and aero engine is what the company started with.
Apparently it's really a piece of the Bavarian state flag. By the way - any good Bavarian will quickly correctly you if you you happen to refer to it as "blue and white". For reasons I don't pretend to understand, it's "white and blue".
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