Posts by Naselus

"But I would say that MS really are quite good with interoperability as a rule."

Indeed, the 'you must buy the whole fricking stack from us or it won't work' thing has always been the Apple MO rather than Microsoft's. MS specialized in ensuring that, no matter what hardware you had, Windows would still BSOD with equal efficiency and regularity. :)

And history shows pretty firmly which business plan worked better, too - MS's work-reasonably-with-everything software absolutely dominated (and continues to do so in the desktop space), while Apple's work-well-but-only-with-our-own-stuff method pretty much bankrupted the company until Jobs went cap-in-hand to Bill Gates for a bailout in the late 90s, and was eventually abandoned by the Mac division in favour of just using the same, vastly superior hardware that PCs had been on for years.

As Philips appear to have just discovered, people don't actually like being aggressively locked into an ecosystem. They'll allow it with new tech (hence how Apple got away with it in the early days), but as a market matures people start asking why, exactly, we should give out a monopoly on peripherals and parts, especially when those monopolies are immediately and inevitably abused to an extreme degree by the suppliers (Why not spend £25 on a cable from the Apple store? No, this one is completely different from the 3rd-party version you can pick up on Amazon for £3, honest...).

Frankly, good on Philips for recognizing that this was going to hurt them in the long term, but shame on them for trying it in the first place. Consumer's ain't stupid and can see it a mile off when you start taking the piss, and won't tolerate it in a mature technology.

Re: None of you morons

"Trump is not a stupid man per se, he is a very intelligent businessman and a showman."

You know, I keep reading this and wondering why the hell people thinking having a successful business makes you intelligent. It doesn't. It most just means you work hard and take dumb risks (also, Trumps business success recodr is questionable, given the number of bankruptcies he has on his record). It's not exactly hard to make a profit, particularly not in real estate (where the market is hard-wired to give inflation-busting ROI) and when you inherit millions of dollars to begin with. I don't think Trumps a moron, but I don't really think there's any evidence that he's of above-average intelligence either.

As to "his utterly medieval views on religion or womens rights."... actually, Trumps history in this regard is considerably more progressive than most of his rivals. He's even been pro-abortion at times, while Ted Cruz actually supports classifying fertilized eggs as people, which would reclassify the morning-after pill as murder.

Re: You're making a mistaken assumption here

"you have to give his hypothesis some attention because of the fact that he has correctly predicted the future"

I'm sorry, are you writing in 2017? Only literally none of the things you list have actually happened yet from where I'm sitting in December 2015. The nominations aren't settled and the first primaries are still over a month away (Trump is incredibly unlikely to get the nomination and unlikely to win the early primaries either), and the election itself is 11 months away (Trump doesn't have much chance of winning that either).

Trump's position in the polls is basically static. He's not losing support, but he's also not really been gaining any either - because anyone who would vote for him is already committed to doing so. He can't appeal to cross-party support without fatally wounding his base; in fact, he can't even appeal to cross-Republican support without doing so (since his entire appeal is to the most deranged Tea Party fanatics who have become so distrustful of Washington that they now think anyone who's ever been in government is too tainted to vote for).

Adams' blog posts on this are for entertainment. They are not a serious analysis. Trump has less support in actual numbers than Bernie Sanders does, and no-one is seriously freaking out about the danger of a Sanders presidency.

"What would you sue adobe for, making a new version?"

It's America, you can sue anyone for anything! :D

Re: There is an alternative…

"There seems to ba a couple of Adobe Fanbois here :)"

I for one don't believe there's any such thing as an Adobe fan. Just people with severe Stockholm syndrome.

But really, the alternatives aren't alternatives. Adobe products are industry standard, and our clients expect psds and indds. If we open stuff up and edit in GIMP, then it can bork PS formatting. I've tried , repeatedly, to offer open source alternatives to standard CC products, but the lock-in goes beyond individual companies and actually covers whole sectors of industry - it's much like how you couldn't send out docs made in Open Office ten years ago, because no-one could open them and Word would screw up the formatting if you did. Everyone was using MS Office because everyone else was using MS Office.

Adobe's monopoly is bad for the industry, and the sooner someone breaks it the better... but overwhelmingly, designers aren't going to accept other programs unless they're both identical in functionality and completely seamless in their interaction with existing Adobe file formats. And nothing offers either of those things yet.

Re: Not really cloudy

"You have to wonder though, how much of the extra revenue is actually coming from home users buying a month here and there who never would have bought a boxed product."

Not much, I'd guess. Most of it is going to come from corporate design houses who now have to pay 3-4 times as much for the software that they were already using day-to-day.

I wouldn't mind... but there's no real advantage over CS6, as near as I can tell. The 'cloud dashboard' has all the functionality of Wordpress in 2006, the cloud version of Acrobat borders on unusable, deployment is actually painful (we had to raise support calls with 2 separate third parties for Adobe's arcane AD lookup, since LDAP isn't good enough for them for some reason), and you still have to deal with Adobe's own sociopathically aggressive support staff who will gladly tell you that any given problem that only affects their programs is caused by literally anything else (even if the only thing the various machines affected have in common is the presence of Adobe products - even if they're on different OSes).

The sooner an open-source alternative can catch up, the better. Adobe products haven't really advanced in any meaningful way for about 10 years.

Re: Do you get paid the same money as a professional?

"would a "99/100 chance of success" put anyone off?"

Anyone who's thinking in terms of datacenter risk scaling, yes. If you have a contractual obligation to 9 9s uptime, then 99/100 chance of success is horrifyingly risky. Think about it by converting it into the number of days you are allowed per single day of downtime.

99/100 means 3 days and a half days of downtime in a year.

99.9 means 8 hours downtime in a year.

99.99 means 50 minutes downtime in a year

99.999 means 5 minutes downtime in a year - this is the minimum level any serious hosting data centre would ever claim to.

By the time you get to 9 9s, you have about 30 milliseconds - as in, your customer won't notice the downtime in the middle of a ping test.

So, when the IT guy says 'there's only a 99% chance of success', what he's saying is 'this is ten million times more risky than our uptime SLA allows for, do not do this under any circumstances'. You can then schedule downtime which is excluded from your SLA uptime target.

Beancounters really ought to understand this, since shoveling risk around is part of their job.

Re: £10,000 a day - but not for very long...

Or that was the only way Talktalk could convince anyone to take the job after the hack had gone down...

Re: This oculd be due to the popularity of windows...

"I don't know if you have a citation for that but in my experience nearly all the malware is either from the malware using a hole in an application that already has escalated privileges (every installed application on your system, eg Flash, Java etc) or can run from userland and doesn't need escalation - eg. cryptowall."

Not really. Spend some time on a warez site and you'll quickly discover just how much malware is delivered via simply asking the user to install it. Like those endless browser object malwares from the mid-2000s that often came bundled with legit software; you downloaded Java, don't untick the minuscule 'also install computer syphilis!' box, and then had to spend the following six weeks trying to peel it off the system. Oracle still haven't stopped shipping toolbars and hijackers with Java.

Besides, most breaches are now more of a combination anyway - there's a significant social engineering element to convince the user to allow the vector to be opened (faking a conference so that you can deliver a fake calendar invite that delivers your payload; metasploiting a fake website etc).

In the end, though, if you think that modern Windows is significantly less secure than Mac OSX, then that just means you don't understand how to configure a modern Windows box properly. Security pros don't see Windows as being any worse than Apple in terms of inherent security - in fact, many find Apple's walled garden deeply worrying because it runs counter to the 'assume you're already breached' philosophy which now dominates infosec (hence why Eugene Kaspersky claimed Apple were over a decade behind Microsoft in security terms in 2012 or so - they are literally working in a different paradigm from modern IT security, like if there was one cutting-edge science lab which insisted on still explaining everything in terms of Phlogiston and Aether).

Re: No absolute numbers provided. Why?

"Because hackers are not interested in the four sad idiots who bought a windows phone, that also goes for App developers too"

While inflammatory, this is pretty much accurate. But it's odd that when no-one targets Windows Phone, it's because no-one uses it, while when no-one targets Apple products (with a similarly tiny userbase) you attribute it to their brilliant security regime as opposed to no-one in their right mind storing anything remotely valuable on a Mac.

Re: So...

"A report on a problem issued by a company that wants to Sell stuff to defend against that problem?"

Yes, I'm an infosec company reporting on information security obviously has a double motive. I won't trust this until it's confirmed by a disinterested actor like a shoe shop or something. I'll get rid of all my network's antivirus and firewalls, too, since I've yet to see a single press release from Topshop advising me to use them.

Re: Solution: More free speech, not less.

" Nazis were national SOCIALISTS,"

Yes, and the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea is a bastion of democracy, and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was a voluntary federation of decentralized small-scale local governments.

Because no-one would ever think of using words they didn't mean in a title just because it sounded good.

"Surely democracy must be capableof throwing up a better candidate"

Probably. We might want to try it some time.

"I've a strong (and slightly worried) feeling that if Clinton were to win the nomination, a lot of people would vote for Trump instead."

Well, except for women, ethnic minorities, liberals, conservatives who think Trump is insane, anyone living on either coast, the technically literate, the functionally literate... Basically, if Trump wins the nomination then Pol Pot could stand against him with Chairman Mao on the ticket and still get 60% of the popular vote.

Most 'establishment' Republicans are also worried that a Trump nomination could lose them a dozen seats in the senate and fifty or more in the House, too. He appeals solely to the anti-state, racist, sexist nutjob fringe of the Republican party, which now apparently accounts for some 50% of their base. The best bit is, even if he doesn't win the nomination, Trump will probably stand anyway and completely split the republican vote. There's simply no chance of a republican president while Trump is involved in the race.

Re: Does anyone think this is a good thing?

"Meanwhile on the shelf at Best Buy is still one choice of laptop OS and all the machines are bulky, low resolution, have four hours of battery life, might as well all be the same brand as if it was still 2005."

Well, yes. But that might be because you're going to Best Buy to get your kit, as opposed to somewhere that stocks decent laptops, which isn't exactly the keystone of every modern product launch. There's some incredible Windows laptops available if you go to an actual PC retailer as opposed to the same shop which sells junk DVDs for three quid a go.

"... as with most government IT, it will end up as a disastrous folly."

Agreed. If we're saying 15TB per year per 1GB connection, with a conservative estimate of 8 million superfast connections in the UK they'd already need 120 exobytes a year, just to store the information generated by the small proportion of UK connections on 1 gig lines. That's like 228TB of additional storage a minute.

Even if we say that only 1% of the data is taken to be 'communications data', the government would need to add a new 3TB hard drive per minute just to keep up with the net connections of 1/10th of the population. It's a bit of a King Lear move, with Teressa May stamping her foot and demanding that the waves turn back.

"And what's really nice is to hear via the grapevine that when the system is eventually replaced that it was due to changing fashions in technology and that the end-users want it back."

Dude, I have end-users who wanted to go back to Windows 2000 after we migrated them to XP. If users are used to something, they will ALWAYS want to go back to it, no matter how much better the replacement is; they would complain that they don't want 'not-syphilis' and everyone was perfectly happy back when they just had syphilis and lived with it.

Re: Continuious Development

"Yes I have worked on many successful projects in the last 40+ years. This includes one for [Large UK City Gov Department] that came in on time and underbudget."

Do you mean it was on time and under budget according to the estimates from the start of the project, or at the end? Because if it's the former, then I don't believe you. No UK gov IT contract has EVER been cheaper and faster than was quoted at the investigative stage.

Re: Needs just a tweak.

"the basic concept of the building is generally not based on the latest fad in Unicorn Poo."

Clearly, you've never worked with architects.