There's a department in my company that does risk underwriting, and because of some vitally important legacy programme, each one of them has two computers- one running the stock corporate Win XP, one stained beige box running Win NT 4.0.
I presume a relevant brain has at some point been bent to the task of somehow porting the programme to XP, and I can only assume that they failed.
It's amazing with how much regularity it happens that a company with a market share bordering on total domination one day can go down to the gutters the next. Not just in tech either.
What I find fascinating about that chart is how things have changed over time. Samsung's profit has been consistent, with only a brief squeeze immediately after the iPhone took off. HTC's profit was consistent right up until last quarter. LG & RIM both (in different ways) experienced a GROWTH in profit share after iPhone, before collapsing again. And Nokia...well, poor old Nokia...
It's a pencil sketch of a rounded rectangle with a smaller rectangle on one surface. While that does accurately describe an iPad, you can't honestly argue that that describes ONLY the iPad...
Yep. We have Kentucky Fried Chicken too, and I'm fairly sure British Petroleum supply petroleum to more than just the British.
Much of my early internet experience was dominated by AOL free trial CDs, which in my house significantly outnumbered all other disks of any sort. This was back in the days when convincing the family to *pay* for internet seemed like an outlandish luxury...
I'm European, so what does it matter to me? We trade plenty with the US, yes, but we also trade plenty with the Asian manufacturing economies. Should it really bother me if the money I hand over for my products goes abroad to America or to Asia?
I'm far more likely to care about the amount of money leaving my pocket and my country being 3-4 times more for one product than another.
I believe it is actually more difficult than it would appear, mainly because you need to give people access to the machine to enter the candidates and when you do that, you are potentially giving them access to do other things.
Do you mean "an admin entering the names of the candidates so they can be displayed for selection", then that's an easily solvable problem. You just give the user an unchangeable selection of "Candidate A", "Candidate B", etc., and print the names of each candidate on posters stuck on and around the polling machine. Finish the evening's count with "Candidate B wins" and then look at the table to see who that is.
If you mean "give the voter access to the machine to make a selection", then I'm not sure I understand the problem- except insofar as they could whip out a screwdriver and start tampering. And that seems like something that can be at least mitigated by making the machine's case along the same design as your average fire safe, with the only visible display/controls being usable only to make a candidate selection.
A) This only happens automatically if you have the option for automatic firmware updating checked in your router's config. You lose your geek card & status if you left this option on. Not that I'm saying the average home user (who almost certainly wouldn't know how/why to change this option) deserves to have his/her data snooped, but as a techie, you should know better.
As a techie, I don't have my router using automatic updates (actually, I'm fairly sure my router doesn't have an automatic updates setting, but all the same).
But as the "techie friend/relative", I always tell my friends and family to keep automatic updates turned on. They certainly wouldn't update these things themselves (mostly they barely know how to access their router's admin page), and I'm not going to be doing it for every single one of them. And an un-updated router is an insecure router.
And they don't deserve to be spied on and have their privacy invaded just because they're not very good at network management.
For some reason every time we teach someone how to think critically and properly evaluate ideas on their merit, they vote for the other party's policies! It's a flipping mystery. Must be some sort of propaganda!
Must be the same reason why that no-good "intellectual elite" are always voting for left-wing policies. If only we could find some sort of correlation...
I think you've missed the point the GP was making.
I believe their point was that Julian Assange had full penetrative sex with these women. But there is no charge of full penetrative rape being levelled against him; he is being charged with "molesting by holding his erect penis up against her". So the question is- if the actual sex wasn't criminal, how can the foreplay be? Or if the sex was consensual, are we sure the foreplay wasn't (and would the distinction have been clear to the accused)?
It'd be like storming into someone's house with a gun, beating them up, and stealing all their money; and the crime that gets levelled against you is "wearing a face mask in a public place". It doesn't make sense that a lesser crime is being accused, but not the more obvious serious crime.
Agreed, that's how I open 99% of programmes under Windows 7 these days. The only things pinned to my taskbar are Firefox and a shortcut to my home folder. The only icons on my desktop are a few "work in progress" files and folders.
I haven't tried Windows 8 yet, so I've no idea what they've replaced the Start Menu with under non-Metro; if it doesn't have an equivalent feature, then that's pure and unadulterated fail.
Do you have any idea how abjectly destitute the average Cuban is, thanks to Castro?
And definitely not to do with the US-led economic embargo, right?
Sarcasm aside, seriously- it's the embargo. Whether you're pro-Castro or pro-USA, everyone admits it's the embargo that's done the economic harm. The Cubans admit it because it's evidence that their problems are not of their own making, and the Americans admit it because it justifies their action (economic harm is exactly what the embargo was designed to do).
There's a reason they went further down the pan after the collapse of the Soviet Union- they lost their biggest non-embargoing trading partner.
In many ways, patent wars resemble a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
If both companies sue each other for patent infringement, they both lose. If neither company sued the other, they would have a pleasant status quo. But if just one company sued the other, they would win big.
Although both players know that they'd be better off if they didn't play, it is literally a logical certainty that they have to sue each other.
I'm not sure how "make a cross licensing agreement and move on" fits into a classic Prisoner's Dilemma, but why let real life complications get in the way of a good philosophy metaphor.
It isn't obeying the law to not sell something to an American citizen who happens to speak a foreign language.
It's against the law to export restricted technology into Iran. It is not against the law to sell them, on US soil, to someone with dual US nationality.
On top of that, many (many) households have multiple cars anyway. Lets say you're a two adult, two car household and both of your normal commutes are under 150 miles a day. It's fairly unlikely that you're both going to have an unusually long, range-breaking trip (to different places, and with no possible alternative travel arrangement) on the same day. So make one of your cars a range-limited electric, the other can be a conventional petrol/diesel. Trade cars as necessary.
Well, I don't know if it's still the case, but when I worked in banking IT in the late 80s here in the US there was a standing rule: if you don't process checks for more than 24 hours, you can be taken over by the Federal Reserve--where that takeover implies the possibility of being shut down and your assets distributed to other banks.
RBS Group has already been taken over by the government; they can't take them over any more than they already have.
And the reason they were taken over is because they were "too big to fail"- so no real possibility of chopping them up and distributing their assets. If they could have done that, they could have just let them collapse and be picked over by their rivals in the first place.
I'd bet on something far more pragmatic. I work for one of their rivals, so I'm sure our systems are broadly comparable.
They've outsourced their mainframe support to an Indian company. They're probably running a similar mainframe set-up to what we are. From the snippets of non-technical fluff that their spokesperson was spouting on Radio 4 yesterday, it sounded like it was their mainframe's daily update programme (which applies changes to customer accounts that have been received in the queue from the mainframe's interfaces with various other systems, such as their BACS/CHAPS/FP systems) that tripped over, apparently when applying a patch to it. That's consistent with them now having a large backlog of payments in and out to work through. It's also consistent with their ATMs still working, seeing as small ATM transactions are dealt with by the Link servers, which then goes on to charge against the customer's account. The cock-up was probably a case of brand new Indian contractors being unfamiliar with the nuances of an ancient set-up.
All guesses obviously, but that's where I'd put my figurative 5p on the side.
That usually means the presentation was made by someone who is incompetent.
The vast majority of people who use presentation software (the entire target market for Powerpoint) are not going to be experts. It's software pretty much explicitly for people are not experts at graphic design (such as your average executive or middle manager) to put together a little visual accompaniment to a meeting they're running. If they needed to be an expert in Powerpoint in order for it to be useful, they probably wouldn't be using Powerpoint- they'd be using a proper graphic design package.
If Microsoft Office is too complicated for the masses of non-IT office workers to use properly, something has gone horribly wrong.
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There's a department in my company that does risk underwriting, and because of some vitally important legacy programme, each one of them has two computers- one running the stock corporate Win XP, one stained beige box running Win NT 4.0.
I presume a relevant brain has at some point been bent to the task of somehow porting the programme to XP, and I can only assume that they failed.
Also see- Nokia.
It's amazing with how much regularity it happens that a company with a market share bordering on total domination one day can go down to the gutters the next. Not just in tech either.
What I find fascinating about that chart is how things have changed over time. Samsung's profit has been consistent, with only a brief squeeze immediately after the iPhone took off. HTC's profit was consistent right up until last quarter. LG & RIM both (in different ways) experienced a GROWTH in profit share after iPhone, before collapsing again. And Nokia...well, poor old Nokia...
nucular
Nuclear.
Sorry, I know; pedantry is the worst form of dickishness. But that one made me hurt somewhere deep inside.
It's a pencil sketch of a rounded rectangle with a smaller rectangle on one surface. While that does accurately describe an iPad, you can't honestly argue that that describes ONLY the iPad...
I've only read TFS, but- doesn't it say that there is a "Windows version" of this malware also doing the rounds?
If so, that's quite fun. Mac actually does have a PC "virus"! It's all grown up!
Ymail is an alternate domain for Yahoo Mail, in the same way as both Gmail and Googlemail are domains used by the Gmail service.
Yep. We have Kentucky Fried Chicken too, and I'm fairly sure British Petroleum supply petroleum to more than just the British.
Much of my early internet experience was dominated by AOL free trial CDs, which in my house significantly outnumbered all other disks of any sort. This was back in the days when convincing the family to *pay* for internet seemed like an outlandish luxury...
I'm European, so what does it matter to me? We trade plenty with the US, yes, but we also trade plenty with the Asian manufacturing economies. Should it really bother me if the money I hand over for my products goes abroad to America or to Asia?
I'm far more likely to care about the amount of money leaving my pocket and my country being 3-4 times more for one product than another.
I believe it is actually more difficult than it would appear, mainly because you need to give people access to the machine to enter the candidates and when you do that, you are potentially giving them access to do other things.
Do you mean "an admin entering the names of the candidates so they can be displayed for selection", then that's an easily solvable problem. You just give the user an unchangeable selection of "Candidate A", "Candidate B", etc., and print the names of each candidate on posters stuck on and around the polling machine. Finish the evening's count with "Candidate B wins" and then look at the table to see who that is.
If you mean "give the voter access to the machine to make a selection", then I'm not sure I understand the problem- except insofar as they could whip out a screwdriver and start tampering. And that seems like something that can be at least mitigated by making the machine's case along the same design as your average fire safe, with the only visible display/controls being usable only to make a candidate selection.
A) This only happens automatically if you have the option for automatic firmware updating checked in your router's config. You lose your geek card & status if you left this option on. Not that I'm saying the average home user (who almost certainly wouldn't know how/why to change this option) deserves to have his/her data snooped, but as a techie, you should know better.
As a techie, I don't have my router using automatic updates (actually, I'm fairly sure my router doesn't have an automatic updates setting, but all the same).
But as the "techie friend/relative", I always tell my friends and family to keep automatic updates turned on. They certainly wouldn't update these things themselves (mostly they barely know how to access their router's admin page), and I'm not going to be doing it for every single one of them. And an un-updated router is an insecure router.
And they don't deserve to be spied on and have their privacy invaded just because they're not very good at network management.
For some reason every time we teach someone how to think critically and properly evaluate ideas on their merit, they vote for the other party's policies! It's a flipping mystery. Must be some sort of propaganda!
Must be the same reason why that no-good "intellectual elite" are always voting for left-wing policies. If only we could find some sort of correlation...
I think you've missed the point the GP was making.
I believe their point was that Julian Assange had full penetrative sex with these women. But there is no charge of full penetrative rape being levelled against him; he is being charged with "molesting by holding his erect penis up against her". So the question is- if the actual sex wasn't criminal, how can the foreplay be? Or if the sex was consensual, are we sure the foreplay wasn't (and would the distinction have been clear to the accused)?
It'd be like storming into someone's house with a gun, beating them up, and stealing all their money; and the crime that gets levelled against you is "wearing a face mask in a public place". It doesn't make sense that a lesser crime is being accused, but not the more obvious serious crime.
Agreed, that's how I open 99% of programmes under Windows 7 these days. The only things pinned to my taskbar are Firefox and a shortcut to my home folder. The only icons on my desktop are a few "work in progress" files and folders.
I haven't tried Windows 8 yet, so I've no idea what they've replaced the Start Menu with under non-Metro; if it doesn't have an equivalent feature, then that's pure and unadulterated fail.
That describes Nigel Farage nicely actually.
Apt metaphor is apt!
Do you have any idea how abjectly destitute the average Cuban is, thanks to Castro?
And definitely not to do with the US-led economic embargo, right?
Sarcasm aside, seriously- it's the embargo. Whether you're pro-Castro or pro-USA, everyone admits it's the embargo that's done the economic harm. The Cubans admit it because it's evidence that their problems are not of their own making, and the Americans admit it because it justifies their action (economic harm is exactly what the embargo was designed to do).
There's a reason they went further down the pan after the collapse of the Soviet Union- they lost their biggest non-embargoing trading partner.
I've been begging for transcripts for ages. Not all of us have the time or ability to watch long video streams all day.
Genuinely- thanks Timothy!
There were six Apollo missions that ... successfully returned them to Earth.
Why pick on the one that didn't?
Did you even read TF title of this story?
Oblig:
http://xkcd.com/927/
In many ways, patent wars resemble a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
If both companies sue each other for patent infringement, they both lose. If neither company sued the other, they would have a pleasant status quo. But if just one company sued the other, they would win big.
Although both players know that they'd be better off if they didn't play, it is literally a logical certainty that they have to sue each other.
I'm not sure how "make a cross licensing agreement and move on" fits into a classic Prisoner's Dilemma, but why let real life complications get in the way of a good philosophy metaphor.
It isn't obeying the law to not sell something to an American citizen who happens to speak a foreign language.
It's against the law to export restricted technology into Iran. It is not against the law to sell them, on US soil, to someone with dual US nationality.
On top of that, many (many) households have multiple cars anyway. Lets say you're a two adult, two car household and both of your normal commutes are under 150 miles a day. It's fairly unlikely that you're both going to have an unusually long, range-breaking trip (to different places, and with no possible alternative travel arrangement) on the same day. So make one of your cars a range-limited electric, the other can be a conventional petrol/diesel. Trade cars as necessary.
Well, I don't know if it's still the case, but when I worked in banking IT in the late 80s here in the US there was a standing rule: if you don't process checks for more than 24 hours, you can be taken over by the Federal Reserve--where that takeover implies the possibility of being shut down and your assets distributed to other banks.
RBS Group has already been taken over by the government; they can't take them over any more than they already have.
And the reason they were taken over is because they were "too big to fail"- so no real possibility of chopping them up and distributing their assets. If they could have done that, they could have just let them collapse and be picked over by their rivals in the first place.
I'd bet on something far more pragmatic. I work for one of their rivals, so I'm sure our systems are broadly comparable.
They've outsourced their mainframe support to an Indian company. They're probably running a similar mainframe set-up to what we are. From the snippets of non-technical fluff that their spokesperson was spouting on Radio 4 yesterday, it sounded like it was their mainframe's daily update programme (which applies changes to customer accounts that have been received in the queue from the mainframe's interfaces with various other systems, such as their BACS/CHAPS/FP systems) that tripped over, apparently when applying a patch to it. That's consistent with them now having a large backlog of payments in and out to work through. It's also consistent with their ATMs still working, seeing as small ATM transactions are dealt with by the Link servers, which then goes on to charge against the customer's account. The cock-up was probably a case of brand new Indian contractors being unfamiliar with the nuances of an ancient set-up.
All guesses obviously, but that's where I'd put my figurative 5p on the side.
That usually means the presentation was made by someone who is incompetent.
The vast majority of people who use presentation software (the entire target market for Powerpoint) are not going to be experts. It's software pretty much explicitly for people are not experts at graphic design (such as your average executive or middle manager) to put together a little visual accompaniment to a meeting they're running. If they needed to be an expert in Powerpoint in order for it to be useful, they probably wouldn't be using Powerpoint- they'd be using a proper graphic design package.
If Microsoft Office is too complicated for the masses of non-IT office workers to use properly, something has gone horribly wrong.