Posts by alain williams

50 years ago ...

you could call the company in question, speak to a real, live human being who could probably deal with it.

Today: you probably can't find a 'phone number, if you do you wait for ages listening to crap music and end up speaking to some inane bot - or if you are really lucky someone in Mumbai who has not got a script to deal with your problem.

Progress :-(

So what did they think of Boris ?

It says here that Boris is Bulgarian or Russian so will he be under special surveillance?

It is more than a trade war

There are aspects of world political dominance. China has become an economic super power, that has given it the clout to throw political weight around and worry less about the consequences, think: Hong Kong, Uighurs Muslims, actions against Taiwan, ... There is a strong direction of travel and we need to look at where that will go to in 20, 50, 100 years time.

I know that the USA has bullied as well, but it is politically much freer than China. You can say things in front of the White House that would have you removed if you said similar in Tiananmen Square.

Decisions like this have many more facets than first meet the eye.

Is this part of the purpose of telemetry ?

"Your customer is doing has installed xxx so sell them Microsoft xxx-enterprise".

Lots of things to be gleaned by looking at what is installed on a machine, even more by looking at web browser logs ... Who knows what they take as the telemetry information is encrypted before being sent to Redmond and there is not a tool that the user can use to decode it.

Who owns the frigging machines ?

Apple or the person who bought it ?

Try the Open Source route

There are Open Source ERP systems. Take a look, do they do enough of what you need ? If so: write the bits that are missing (ie customise) and move over.

Yes: it will cost you, but it costs millions to migrate to SAP and then pay annual license fees - which costs more.

No support ? Work with others who use your chosen ERP to your mutual benefit. Push up to github/where-ever the code that you write: others will use it (if it is any good) and fix bugs and add features - which is to your benefit.

Some IT directors will refuse for the same reasons that they bought IBM & Microsoft.

Server side rendering is as it should be

The current trend of building the page with javascript in the browser is wrong. It just complicates things for the browser and means that the browser has to run javascript from all manner of places.

Server side rendering means that for the browser it is KISS.

To stop it happening again ...

which should be one of the ICO's aims, should they not have insisted that Marriott be audited by an independent White Hat type organisation for 10 years ? Hopefully the WH types would kick up a fuss at poor/sloppy practice and make them fix it.

I do not know if the ICO has the power to order this, if not then time to get a quick bill through parliament.

"cumbersome to read, difficult to understand"

These privacy policies are obscure by design and so long that most give up reading them - the companies that have them do not want people to understand them.

There needs to be an agreement written to be easy to read and given aka kite mark which shows that it is reasonable, fair, etc. There should be several varients to cover different sorts of relationship and be capable of having a schedule attachment to cover things like "how many days to deliver", "postage", etc.

Surely you just press buttons harder ?

Is that not what the typical Brit does when in Costa del something ? It usually seems to work; but the words for wine & beer are usually well understood.

Oh, wait: we are talking about non English speakers ... so, these people know that volume in not a key to universal understanding - apologies!

Why only 2 oz ?

Can anyone enlighten me as to why NASA would send an 880 kg space craft on a 7 year mission and only bring back 2.1 oz ? Would it really make much difference to the machine to have a bigger suitcase and so be able to give a sample to more labs when it gets back ?

Maybe take samples from different places on Bennu.

What do you need to tell ...

to open an account ? If it is username & email address then meh [burner emails are easy], but name, address, would get me worried; credit card info would ring warning bells.

They seem to want to charge 10c but only for those under 13 years. Hmmm

What is the advanage to Microsoft ?

What local information does it 'leak' back to Redmond ?

I suppose that it might be a good test: if they can get a browser working on Linux then they will have cleaned up many components needed to get other ported to Linux as well.

ISO 9000

I'll wager that Morgan Stanley is ISO 9000 "compliant", but this is often a box ticking exercise that means jack all if nobody bothers -- except when it is certification time.

Will this just not make Google richer ?

This stops "sharing or selling of personal data", it does not stop use of data that has been collated by looking at & collating who does what on many, many web sites.

They will just say "we track everybody so we understand everything about everybody. GPC means that we cannot tell you anything, but we have new services that we can sell you that: do anything on your behalf & so let you do almost anything to anybody. So you will reap benefits of all our tracking of everybody (and we get lots more $$)" ?

If I visit a web site I kind of understand that they will learn something about me from that visit. What I do not want is:

* data from the many web sites that I visit collated to draw up a profile about me.

* the use of spooky/subversive techniques (more that just cookies) to identify me, eg abuse of ETags.

Maybe I do not understand but I think that this is naive and will not be much more effective than DNT ...

A big problem with opex ...

is that you need to be able to continue to service the on-going cost. This is especially painful when your income suddenly drops - maybe due to a certain virus. If you have bought the hardware outright then no one can take it away because you stop paying them. OK you do need to pay when something breaks, but that does not need to be who you bought it from (unless you bought a John Deere tractor).

Yes: capex means that you need to be able to stump up the cash when you buy it, this can be especially hard for a new/growing org.

ICO seems to have grown some teeth recently

Long may this continue.

I don't know if it will start to deal with some of the evil ones who track us from web site to web site when we have explicitly set Do Not Track in our web browser. It would be nice, but I don't know what legal basis it could use.

Presumably also less power usage ...

No 32 bit instructions so less silicon. Less silicon so less power needed.

If the orange one is re-elected ...

this report will sink beneath the waves

"customers' best partner in digital transformation,

This means that customers will need to change how they deal with Fujitsu to fit in with the new SAP \w ERP system.

Suppliers will be similarly afflicted.

Javascript security flaws ...

You could start by pointing out that loading any javascript from google-analytics.com results is a loss of privacy about the person who is web browsing.

Nice to see someone taking the blame

made it plain that mess was the result of its own mistakes and key technology provider Fujitsu was not at fault.

Wow - someone not trying to blame someone else for their cock up. Please promote whoever said that!

4GB is plently enough RAM

for what I use a laptop for: something to take out & about, a bit of web browsing, ssh, libreoffice. It has a small 12.4" screen which makes a nice fit for my rucksack. I assume that I will be able to upgrade the OS to Linux Mint or similar.

My main machine at home is more powerful. El Reg reviewers always assume that everyone needs a lot of grunt, not true.

£550 is a tad expensive for a small machine to use on walkabout, there are others that are cheaper. Finding a small screen is harder.

Capricious abuse of power

The likes of google give themselves judicial like powers and then act in a way that can materially affect people. There is hardly any real oversight in the way that they use these powers, very often the decisions are done so as to cause them as little work as possible.

They have global reach and so should be subject to court decisions in the countries where they are visible.

If this were to happen ...

it would mean that devices for which there are only Windows drivers (Eg strange wifi cards) should cease to be a thing of the past - ie I should have no problems upgrading from MS Windows to Linux when I buy a new laptop.

In reality there will still be some kit (probably from China) that ships with proprietary device drivers for which they refuse to release the source code - completely breaching the GPL and them not caring.

Two other metrics ...

that are important with mobile networks:

* coverage - how many not-spots ?

* uptime - how few are the times when the network fails or degrades ?

At point of sale ...

by law all devices that depend on some server, that the purchaser does not control, should have PROMINENTLY marked that this is so AND the earliest date at which the server might be withdrawn.

So iOS is now better than Windows 10

MS Windows only resets preferences after an upgrade, iOS does it after a reboot.

Do you think that MS will take this as a challenge and reduce the times that preferences stick ?