Since it has become public knowledge that US authorities can demand the "protected" data at any time, even from subsidiaries abroad, the value of any certification or demonstration is questionable.
That alone could end up making the Safe Harbor rules unusable for US companies, regardless of FTC enforcement. Depending on the EU court's ultimate decision of course.
Well, if I understand the case correctly, the ratification may end up being invalid. As analogy, imagine the US ratifies a treaty and the SCOTUS finds it unconstitutional afterwards. I guess the US constitution would win over the ratification too.
And BTW, I can fully imagine that the EU was sloppy in the ratification process.
The EU is trying to dictate the law to companies that are doing business in Europe, not against the US government or congress. Which every country does on its territory. Note that the case is against Facebook, not the US government.
Some of these companies happen to be US companies. Who may be in a bind soon, as the European Court of Justice is likely to invalidate the Safe Harbor Agreement, as it usually follows the advice of its general attorney. If that happens, said US companies are no longer allowed to store data of EU citizens outside the EU, but at the same time they may be told by the US via national security letter to hand over those data.
If both the US and the EU stay adamant, companies like Facebook may have to choose between doing business in the US or in Europe.
Well, GP was not talking about keeping control of stuff customers think they bought, but about the increased risk of that stuff being unavailable through technical difficulties. And I think he is right.
Downloading only what you need for a certain device I can see working.
But keeping even part of that stuff on the Cloud and downloading it "on demand" is a recipe for trouble. Connection failures happen, you know.
If this place is anything like a couple of them I've seen before though? They likely decided to become primarily a "Linux shop" in the first place because they were unwilling to spend much on I.T. -- and somewhere along the line, staff deployed Linux as a way to keep old/obsolete hardware functional.
This may be a valid approach if there are no Windows-only applications that are not easily replaced. But that is something you need to find out as soon as possible. IMHO that will make the difference between being able to switch to Linux in the short run and looking at a long transition period.
For the City of Munich, switching to Linux took several years because they had lots of old applications on Windows for which there were no Linux equivalents.
I'm staying on Win 7 for now, and this will only change if I can get a Win 10 Enterprise from "unofficial sources" or Microsoft relents with the spying.
If not, I might completely switch to Linux in 2020 when extended support for Win 7 runs out. It may be inferior for gaming, but I'm approaching 50 and the urge to kill pixelated monsters is diminishing with age. For any other purpose, I'm quite happy with Linux.
And if they go on like that, they can keep "their" operating system too. I'd have to make do with less games, but otherwise all the applications I need are available on Linux.
Well, Microsoft had a Windows XP and a Windows 7 in between those bad releases. Otherwise, Windows market share might have suffered a lot more.
Now it will be interesting to see if Windows 10 can be one of the good versions. But even if not, Microsoft can survive thanks to Windows 7 until Windows 11 comes out. Displacing a succesful Windows version is very hard, to the point where a lot of people still run XP (even if I doubt the wisdom of that...).
On one hand, I acknowledge that a website owner may run the site as he sees fit. Which includes ads to earn some money
On the other hand, I don't feel obliged to pay attention to the ads or even let them onto my computer. So I don't have any qualms about using software like NoScript.
In everyday use, I tend to allow non-obtrusive ads that don't bog down my computer too much. The bogging down is noticeable at times BTW. I'm sometimes on a measly 2MBit/s connection with an older PC, and then the bandwidth and CPU demands of ads can be significant. At other times, loading websites goes slooowly because some ad server cannot keep up with the load (often ad.doubleclick.net. I've blocked that site specifically since).
I have some reservations about the privacy policy of Google, and by extension about their products. Adobe appear to be incompetents, but I don't trust Google to be not evil.
That's why the initiative to kill it should come from corporate users, not Adobe. By stopping using it.
Google using HTML5 for Youtube videos, so you don't need Flash for that anymore, was a good start. Next I'd like to see is Spiegel.de, the online branch of the German News magazine. Last time I checked, they still used Flash for their video clips. A few more of those jumping ship and I won't really notice Flash missing from my computer...
I usually go by the performance index of www.3dcenter.org, which gives an average performance value relative to the Radeon HD 5750/6750 GDDR5, which is defined as 100%. The index is not based on theoretical GFLOPS, but on tests by various review sites (mostly gaming) and calculated for benchmark results at 1920x1080 with 4x multisampling anti-aliasing.
This explains why Nvidia looks better in the 3dcenter.org ranking, as they usually get more gaming performance out of cards with the same GFLOPS. 3dcenter.org also calculates a performance/watt rating where they divide the performance index by the typical power consumption in games. The result is in percent of performance per watt, and as explained above it favors Nvidia. Of course, if you do something other than gaming, your results may differ.
The best result at the moment is for the GTX 980 4GB at 3.45, closely followed by the 750Ti at 3.44. I used the 750Ti as example of a midrange card that still performs quite nicely compared to high end cards of a few years ago. Current market price is 130-145 Euro. The Fury X is listed with a performance per watt of 2.32.
BTW, Wikipedia says that
Full-height cards may increase their power after configuration. They can use up to 75 W (3.3 V Ã-- 3 A + 12 V Ã-- 5.5 A)
Graphics cards manufacturers use that routinely to save a few cent on the extra connector.
In the last years, Nvidia have made big strides in reducing their power consumption for a given performance. You can buy the "latest-and-greatest" in performance, which will outperform older cards, OR you can get similar performance in a smaller, cooler and cheaper package. The 750Ti comes to mind: It is "only" a midrange card, but with a power consumption of 60-70W it does not even need an additional PCIe power connector.
Recently, AMD are also getting closer with HBM on the Fury (although they are still falling a bit short of Nvidia).
If you think back a few years, the roles were reversed BTW: Nvidia was still on the Fermi (also derided as "Thermi") architecture and significantly less efficient than AMD's HD5xxx series.
Looking forward, the.14nm process is supposed to come out in 2016 and HBM is supposed to get its 2nd generation. I think those will be good times.
1600x900 here, on a one year old Fujitsu Lifebook E 782. Which is overall a nice but not really high end system. Typical prices used to be in the 900-950 Euro range a year ago. Today, the E554 seems to be its equivalent, available with 1.920 x 1.080 display for a bit over 800 Euro.
It seems that your management was just being cheap when they stuck you on laptops with a "720p" display;-)
Well, GP explicitly mentioned gamers, who are quite the opposite of business users when it comes to upgrading.
Where businesses hesitate to upgrade, often to the point of running unsupported OS versions because "it works" (until it doesn't;-), gamers tend to err on the side of being overenthusiastic.
That includes stuff like running alpha versions and beta drivers, and since Windows has by far the largest selection of available games, it has to be Windows for most of them. I predict that DirectX 12 really will drive adoption of Windows 10 in the home user market.
In any event, MS would be ill advised to open source anything. As soon as they do, they are no longer the only source for updates, and once they are no longer the only source for updates, they will no longer be the *best* source for updates, since it is likely that a young upstart company with some intelligence behind it is going to be able to run rings around MS.
It would still be the only official source for updates. Windows would almost certainly not accept third-party sources by default.
It would be the only official source for updates for the original version. But if Windows was entirely open source, not just a few components, the third party version could accept whatever the third party wants.
I think it could be similar to CentOS cloning RedHat: Switch out the trademaked logos, perhaps change a few URLs in the update mechanism to point to the servers of the third party and run the whole thing as "alternative" system...
Yes, but at least the overall efficiency is similar to Nvidia now.
Personally, I find the Fury too expensive and power-hungry, so I might get a new machine next year or 2017. When Zen and midrange HBM graphics cards are available.
Well, tell your boss about the email stash and how it may still be important. If he agrees, export the whole email stash into an archive. In the same discussion, you should arrange a storage location for the archive. After all, your successor has to know about where to find the archive, and it will probably your boss who has to tell him.
If management doesn't agree about preserving the emails, it's their problem if the mail disappears after 90 days.
Otherwise, I'll quote Rhook's sibling post:
Management may very well ask for help in the future. At which point you tell them "$200/hour, 4 hour minimum".
It is not primarily an ad blocker, but as most ads are served via JavaScript, not allowing domains like ad.doubleclick.something will greatly reduce the flood of unwanted ads and scripts.
The RequestPolicy website also recommends NoScript as additional measure BTW.
Visual Studio being free is nice, but that alone won't help here.
At the very least, one would have to 1) audit the source code for back doors 2) compile the applications and Windows versions to be checked for backdoors from that source 3) and then -either distribute the self-compiled programs within the organization -or compare the hash values of the self-compiled programs to those bought from official sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Since it has become public knowledge that US authorities can demand the "protected" data at any time, even from subsidiaries abroad, the value of any certification or demonstration is questionable.
That alone could end up making the Safe Harbor rules unusable for US companies, regardless of FTC enforcement. Depending on the EU court's ultimate decision of course.
Well, if I understand the case correctly, the ratification may end up being invalid. As analogy, imagine the US ratifies a treaty and the SCOTUS finds it unconstitutional afterwards. I guess the US constitution would win over the ratification too.
And BTW, I can fully imagine that the EU was sloppy in the ratification process.
The EU is trying to dictate the law to companies that are doing business in Europe, not against the US government or congress. Which every country does on its territory. Note that the case is against Facebook, not the US government.
Some of these companies happen to be US companies. Who may be in a bind soon, as the European Court of Justice is likely to invalidate the Safe Harbor Agreement, as it usually follows the advice of its general attorney. If that happens, said US companies are no longer allowed to store data of EU citizens outside the EU, but at the same time they may be told by the US via national security letter to hand over those data.
If both the US and the EU stay adamant, companies like Facebook may have to choose between doing business in the US or in Europe.
Well, GP was not talking about keeping control of stuff customers think they bought, but about the increased risk of that stuff being unavailable through technical difficulties. And I think he is right.
Downloading only what you need for a certain device I can see working.
But keeping even part of that stuff on the Cloud and downloading it "on demand" is a recipe for trouble. Connection failures happen, you know.
If this place is anything like a couple of them I've seen before though? They likely decided to become primarily a "Linux shop" in the first place because they were unwilling to spend much on I.T. -- and somewhere along the line, staff deployed Linux as a way to keep old/obsolete hardware functional.
This may be a valid approach if there are no Windows-only applications that are not easily replaced. But that is something you need to find out as soon as possible. IMHO that will make the difference between being able to switch to Linux in the short run and looking at a long transition period.
For the City of Munich, switching to Linux took several years because they had lots of old applications on Windows for which there were no Linux equivalents.
Well, count me among the shitters then :-)
I'm staying on Win 7 for now, and this will only change if I can get a Win 10 Enterprise from "unofficial sources" or Microsoft relents with the spying.
If not, I might completely switch to Linux in 2020 when extended support for Win 7 runs out. It may be inferior for gaming, but I'm approaching 50 and the urge to kill pixelated monsters is diminishing with age. For any other purpose, I'm quite happy with Linux.
And if they go on like that, they can keep "their" operating system too. I'd have to make do with less games, but otherwise all the applications I need are available on Linux.
Well, Microsoft had a Windows XP and a Windows 7 in between those bad releases. Otherwise, Windows market share might have suffered a lot more.
Now it will be interesting to see if Windows 10 can be one of the good versions. But even if not, Microsoft can survive thanks to Windows 7 until Windows 11 comes out. Displacing a succesful Windows version is very hard, to the point where a lot of people still run XP (even if I doubt the wisdom of that...).
On one hand, I acknowledge that a website owner may run the site as he sees fit. Which includes ads to earn some money
On the other hand, I don't feel obliged to pay attention to the ads or even let them onto my computer. So I don't have any qualms about using software like NoScript.
In everyday use, I tend to allow non-obtrusive ads that don't bog down my computer too much. The bogging down is noticeable at times BTW. I'm sometimes on a measly 2MBit/s connection with an older PC, and then the bandwidth and CPU demands of ads can be significant.
At other times, loading websites goes slooowly because some ad server cannot keep up with the load (often ad.doubleclick.net. I've blocked that site specifically since).
Nope, Firefox all the way.
I have some reservations about the privacy policy of Google, and by extension about their products.
Adobe appear to be incompetents, but I don't trust Google to be not evil.
HTML5 does not have the abysmal history of exploits that Flash has. I would not mind Flash if Adobe was making decent software ;-)
I just deinstalled Flash and tried Spiegel.de again. It still works.One more problem solved :-)
That's why the initiative to kill it should come from corporate users, not Adobe. By stopping using it.
Google using HTML5 for Youtube videos, so you don't need Flash for that anymore, was a good start. Next I'd like to see is Spiegel.de, the online branch of the German News magazine. Last time I checked, they still used Flash for their video clips. A few more of those jumping ship and I won't really notice Flash missing from my computer...
I usually go by the performance index of www.3dcenter.org, which gives an average performance value relative to the Radeon HD 5750/6750 GDDR5, which is defined as 100%.
The index is not based on theoretical GFLOPS, but on tests by various review sites (mostly gaming) and calculated for benchmark results at 1920x1080 with 4x multisampling anti-aliasing.
This explains why Nvidia looks better in the 3dcenter.org ranking, as they usually get more gaming performance out of cards with the same GFLOPS.
3dcenter.org also calculates a performance/watt rating where they divide the performance index by the typical power consumption in games. The result is in percent of performance per watt, and as explained above it favors Nvidia. Of course, if you do something other than gaming, your results may differ.
The best result at the moment is for the GTX 980 4GB at 3.45, closely followed by the 750Ti at 3.44. I used the 750Ti as example of a midrange card that still performs quite nicely compared to high end cards of a few years ago. Current market price is 130-145 Euro. The Fury X is listed with a performance per watt of 2.32.
BTW, Wikipedia says that
Full-height cards may increase their power after configuration. They can use up to 75 W (3.3 V Ã-- 3 A + 12 V Ã-- 5.5 A)
Graphics cards manufacturers use that routinely to save a few cent on the extra connector.
In the last years, Nvidia have made big strides in reducing their power consumption for a given performance. You can buy the "latest-and-greatest" in performance, which will outperform older cards, OR you can get similar performance in a smaller, cooler and cheaper package. The 750Ti comes to mind:
It is "only" a midrange card, but with a power consumption of 60-70W it does not even need an additional PCIe power connector.
Recently, AMD are also getting closer with HBM on the Fury (although they are still falling a bit short of Nvidia).
If you think back a few years, the roles were reversed BTW:
Nvidia was still on the Fermi (also derided as "Thermi") architecture and significantly less efficient than AMD's HD5xxx series.
Looking forward, the .14nm process is supposed to come out in 2016 and HBM is supposed to get its 2nd generation. I think those will be good times.
Really off topic but I'll bite:
1600x900 here, on a one year old Fujitsu Lifebook E 782. Which is overall a nice but not really high end system. Typical prices used to be in the 900-950 Euro range a year ago. Today, the E554 seems to be its equivalent, available with 1.920 x 1.080 display for a bit over 800 Euro.
It seems that your management was just being cheap when they stuck you on laptops with a "720p" display ;-)
Well, GP explicitly mentioned gamers, who are quite the opposite of business users when it comes to upgrading.
Where businesses hesitate to upgrade, often to the point of running unsupported OS versions because "it works" (until it doesn't ;-), gamers tend to err on the side of being overenthusiastic.
That includes stuff like running alpha versions and beta drivers, and since Windows has by far the largest selection of available games, it has to be Windows for most of them. I predict that DirectX 12 really will drive adoption of Windows 10 in the home user market.
If that was true, I might pirate Windows and run Libre Office as my office suite (at home). Gaming is the only thing I still need Windows for...
In any event, MS would be ill advised to open source anything. As soon as they do, they are no longer the only source for updates, and once they are no longer the only source for updates, they will no longer be the *best* source for updates, since it is likely that a young upstart company with some intelligence behind it is going to be able to run rings around MS.
It would still be the only official source for updates. Windows would almost certainly not accept third-party sources by default.
It would be the only official source for updates for the original version. But if Windows was entirely open source, not just a few components, the third party version could accept whatever the third party wants.
I think it could be similar to CentOS cloning RedHat:
Switch out the trademaked logos, perhaps change a few URLs in the update mechanism to point to the servers of the third party and run the whole thing as "alternative" system...
I guess Intel might eventually get there. For midrange stuff at least. Their Iris Pro GPUs are already getting close to AMD's APUs.
But it is quite possible that they keep it as high price "laptop exclusive". Especially if AMD goes tits up.
Yes, but at least the overall efficiency is similar to Nvidia now.
Personally, I find the Fury too expensive and power-hungry, so I might get a new machine next year or 2017. When Zen and midrange HBM graphics cards are available.
Well, tell your boss about the email stash and how it may still be important. If he agrees, export the whole email stash into an archive. In the same discussion, you should arrange a storage location for the archive. After all, your successor has to know about where to find the archive, and it will probably your boss who has to tell him.
If management doesn't agree about preserving the emails, it's their problem if the mail disappears after 90 days.
Otherwise, I'll quote Rhook's sibling post:
Management may very well ask for help in the future. At which point you tell them "$200/hour, 4 hour minimum".
Students are supposed to pay back their loans. Sure, some of them will default, but the assumption is that most of those loans will be paid back.
Defense contractors and healthcare companies usually keep their money.
It is not primarily an ad blocker, but as most ads are served via JavaScript, not allowing domains like ad.doubleclick.something will greatly reduce the flood of unwanted ads and scripts.
The RequestPolicy website also recommends NoScript as additional measure BTW.
Visual Studio being free is nice, but that alone won't help here.
At the very least, one would have to
1) audit the source code for back doors
2) compile the applications and Windows versions to be checked for backdoors from that source
3) and then
-either distribute the self-compiled programs within the organization
-or compare the hash values of the self-compiled programs to those bought from official sources.