That's just scumbaggery of the highest order, and you're not the first to report it.
Fuck you, AVG, and I was someone who sent dozens, if not hundreds of people your way over the years by my recommendations - and not just "free" users.
Comodo are my current "least hated" equivalent, but even they are doing some funky shit with their shellcode injection options being active EVEN WHEN DISABLED and interfering with things like the newest versions of Chrome being able to load successfully. Shit like that shouldn't happen if I've turned the option off - god knows how many random blue-screens and crashes that accounts for world-wide and nobody would suspect their firewall/antivirus of interfering in programs in that manner.
"Company releases tool that utilises its competitor's openness in order to suck in your data into a system that doesn't have that same ease of transfer functionality in return."
It sounds very much like a one-way-street to me. But I don't use Apple, except in my job, so I may be unaware of some great export tool that makes it really easy to bring all your contacts etc. out of an Apple device to put it in standardised formats for you that need anything but the device you're using to export from and some storage device?
The nearest I can see on a quick Google is to iCloud them, then from a computer with iCloud Contacts (which might require Outlook or Mac software?) to manually export a vCard which you can then import somewhere else on your own. The other FAQ's I've stumbled across for this imply things like syncing to a computer and/or installing third-party apps.
Tell me... do you want to migrate to a system that's REALLY easy to migrate into from others, but doesn't offer that in return?
I work in schools. I work IT in schools. I work exclusively in schools. I've only ever worked in schools. I've worked in private and state, primary, secondary, further education, and after-school tuition centres.
Computers are a tool. Like a pen, a textbook, a folder, a table, a desk, or anything else.
Use them properly and they can help make things more efficient. That includes teaching. Use them improperly, buy them "for show", or think they'll work some magic on their own and you'll be disappointed.
In the same way that signing in 30 kids every morning and again in the afternoon takes ten minutes with pen and paper and lots of shuffling paper and people involved, but electronic registers take seconds and everyone who needs to can see the results instantly. It's a tool. Use it properly and it works.
What it does NOT do is teach kids. That's what teachers do (or at least are supposed to do). A teacher with an electronic timetable, who knows how to use it, is more productive and gets more time to teach than those who are shuffling bits of paper around multiple room. A teacher who can share his document with the kids and get a collaborative result, even as part of homework without themselves being present, can work wonders.
But what makes it work is the teacher. Not the tool. Give a carpenter or wood craftsman a cheap chisel and he can still produce a work of art. Give him the right tools and they'll be more refined and better quality and take less time. But give a chisel to a monkey and you won't get a mahogany table out of it. Computers are no different - a tool for professionals.
The misconception is that somehow computers on their own magically transform the most mediocre of teachers into teaching geniuses with wonderfully attentive students. It's not true.
I work in IT in schools, it's all I know and all I've ever done. Remove the IT and good teachers will still thrive and bad teachers still fail. Remove the teachers and the IT is next to fucking useless. Bear in mind that I spend vast portions of my working life at opposition to these people, that many schools have a large "teacher/non-teacher" divide that rarely gets crossed, socially or otherwise. That these people are the bane of my life.
But still, it's the teachers that make the difference, and the way they teach. And if we can get all the crap and paperwork and tracking and other shit out of their way as much as possible, they will have more time to teach kids. It's literally an admin task. Bringing tech into the classroom "just because" is dangerous and stupid.
The right teacher with the right tool can work wonders. But it's not the tool that's doing it. It's not the chisel that's so wonderful that it's making works of art. It's the way it's put to use.
In the UK, schools have been expected to get in computers to meet official ratios (X computers per Y pupils). That's fucking ludicrous. They have been expected to make use of things "just because" they are there. They have been expected to fully kit out every classroom no matter the subject or how little used. We have parents who are able to use their kids school iPads as a status symbol amongst over parents in other schools. We have teachers performing death-by-powerpoint thinking it improves their teaching. It does not.
But computers still have a place. They are merely an automation tool. A machine. That removes the repetitive burden of filling out a thousand school reports in twenty subjects. That allows the kids to manipulate 3D objects that I couldn't even get my computer to DRAW on the screen when I was a kid.
The problem is that people think that every app on the appstores, every website they are sold, every resource available must be used for every god-damn thing. Teachers BUY lesson plans, in big books, on what apps to use and what services to sign up to, and what looks cool to senior management. And so some of them have actually stopped teaching.
I would seriously worry about someone who could approach work in the manner you prescribe - there are good jobs and bad jobs, and the purpose of all is to pay for leisure. The number of people who can find ALL of their leisure at work is vanishingly small, literally the billionaires who can do what they like. Are you seriously suggesting that if you were to win the lottery and never needed to work again, you'd be in the office before 9am every day until retirement age still?
The rest of the jobs - sure, you might enjoy them, but if you are PICKING your job, you're already part of the privileged few. I speak as one of those people, incidentally, after running a business for over 10 years and then doing it as a full-time paid job afterwards.
There are very, very, very, very few jobs that are desirable to the few people who can do them, to such an extent that they'd choose to do them even if there was no need for recompense.
Having a passion for you job is great. It's also - from my experience - the cause of so many burn-outs and disappointments that it's actually a warning sign. If someone's in the office long past their hours for no real necessary reason, it's a big, large, flashing, red warning. Something is wrong at home, or something is wrong at work. The longer that persists, the more dangerous it is.
It doesn't mean you can't do your job properly, professionally, with enthusiasm, and go above and beyond... it's that it's literally just that - a job (work, chore, labour, task, these are all synonyms),
You get no brownie points for staying late, I promise you, no matter what's said. Especially when you're not actually any more productive by doing so. If your work is so great that it's your leisure, then you're likely to lose both when circumstances change. Unless you're the CEO, those circumstances WILL change.
But I've seen too many people burned-out and making themselves ill for a *work atmosphere* they love, or a *company* they love or a *skill* they love, and end up realising that it's not the *job* they love at all.
It's not about working with stuff you hate. It's that you'll never work with all the stuff you love as the only part of your job. Vets spend most of their time killing the animals they are trying to care for. Doctors, in watching people get sick and die. IT guys spend most of their time trying to make things that were deliberately designed not to work together, work together. And so on. Add on paperwork and compliance and health & safety and all that stuff that surrounds the things you DO want to do (nobody - NOBODY - wants to be enjoying a job doing that kind of legwork) and it's a mess.
Don't hate your job. Just don't live SOLELY for it. Because one tick of a HR button and you've lost vast portions of your life.
Sounds like what you really want is a smoke system connected to the alarm.
Rather than alarms (which do nothing unless they alarm someone who's guaranteed to come running in time - let's be honest, a text to your phone or a friendly neighbour is more useful here than any amount of law enforcement, security companies or loud blaring alarms annoying your neighbours), you want to stop someone in their tracks.
Connect smoke system and, in your average untargetted burglary, it's then not really possible to steal anything in time. Alarm goes off, home fills with smoke, you can't see shit and you're so "alarmed" by that that you run off.
Dogs can be ignored, if you have the right approach. Hell, a sausage from a stranger will tame just about any beast that you're choosing to keep near your kids at night.
CCTV is useless... even when it captures, it doesn't stop. And most of the time it won't capture. I've supplied CCTV to police any number of times in my job and when neighbours were burgled. They were singularly useless as everyone looks the same in a hoodie and cap, and not at all suspicious walking around the local areas.
Alarms are useless except to alert YOU to the problem. That may or may not be useful but chances are that the peace of mind that you get a text even if something's smashed when nobody notices during the day is enough. And when it goes off, you can ring a friend to pop round, or phone the neighbour to ask if they could have a look. At least you might end up with a witness or a car plate or scaring them off, though.
But a smoke system - unless they KNOW it's present and bring night-vision or something - stops them and actually prevents them even in a smash-and-grab.
The problem with security is that people do what they think works, rather than what actually works. Literally, sneak into your own house and see how crap most camera placement, etc. is if you were prepared to just cover up and smash a window.
Make your place look secure. Make it look more effort than it's worth. Don't leave expensive shit on show. Lock doors. Don't buy cheap tacky signs and fake plastic cameras. And twitch the curtains once in a while if you see people stopping in cars outside - they may well be reccying the place. And if you want to actually STOP the crime in progress, or be alerted to a crime in progress, deploy a system that does that.
CCTV is only useful for after-the-event, for insurance purposes and things like that.
Much better to put in decent window locks and get in the habit of double-locking doors and costing them every few seconds you can than almost anything else.
Neighbours on both sides of my house have been burgled in the last year. I'm not claiming infallibility here, but access to my house/garden just LOOKS in a totally different class. They had no garden gate, unprotected side-alleys into the back of the house, had left a window at the back open (even if it was tiny) while they were out, old broken windows out front, etc. The neighbour was FOLLOWED HOME from the local train station after attending a religious event covered head-to-toe in their family gold and DID NOTHING TO REPORT IT, despite being worried for their children immediately afterwards. The next day, they were broken into and only the gold was stolen.
A few days after that, they were back banging on the doors and bothering their children who were home alone to try to get them to open the door. Nobody thought to phone police and/or yell for help from neighbours until hours later (or at all in the latter case!).
However, at no point, did the culprits walk within shot of anything to do with my CCTV system. We know, because the police asked for it, and there was nothing. They'd obviously reccied and decided exactly how they were going to do it, including jumping a small garden fence so that they didn't need to walk down my neighbour's path (covered by my CCTV) to approach their house.
And they knew enough to steer clear of the house with live CCTV
The problem is really: Do you want to be managing this stuff yourself? I know, when I get home, the last thing I want to happen is some problem with a security system that I'm the only one who knows how to fix.
There's no harm in joining modules, but doing everything from integration to day-to-day tasks on a computer that you'll have to manage? That's a pain in the butt.
It's the same with electronics - some of this stuff is cheap and easy to make, but the hassle of doing so compared to a tiny purchase for a support product is rarely worth the hassle. I have set up motion-capture cameras that send me the footage to my phone using systems like "motion". But the day I saw a 1Tb DVR with 8 CCTV camera in-ports, 8 audio-in ports, VGA out, smartphone control and four day/night cameras with all the cabling, for less than the price of a tablet computer, it was a no-brainer. And I can just set it and leave it and be assured that it'll be running overnight. Hell, the only thing I can envision happening is drive-failure and it has email warning for that even if the drive can't boot.
The question is really what you want to achieve and whether you want a zero-management solution, or whether you're after a hobbyist security project with lots of tinkering and testing and times when it falls over because of something unaccounted for? Most people want the first option.
The beauty of self-delusion is that you only have to convince yourself.
Honestly, there isn't a European country that does, or would want to, work as long or for as little recompense (monetary or otherwise) as the US does. And the best bit is that your companies have you belief this is your choice!
Europeans strikes are legendary. They cost at least one British Prime Minister her job, even in a dying industry. They're still going on to this day, in just about every industry imaginable. Union representation is high and actually one of the main political parties in the UK has run the country only because it's backed by worker's unions.
Europeans view work as... the necessary evil to earn money to enjoy the rest of your life (the other 2/3rds of the working day - 1/3rd of which is SLEEP! - and the holidays and weekends). Sure, there are a handful of workaholics but it's not really aspired to in any way, shape or form. And when the work isn't suitable or fair, we actually stop working, and demand laws to make it fair.
Just off the top of my head in the UK, coal miner's strikes, Ford Dagenham plant, the rail system, statutory parental leave (including paternal), and zero-hours contracts. All resulted in fairer working laws which almost always worked in the favour of the workers, not the employer. The French are on strike over pay and conditions in the Eurotunnel - even before the latest migrant problems.
(P.S. I'm extraordinarily anti-union, because it brings my country's services to a halt whenever someone feels there's a grievance... but you can't say for a second that the UK law isn't inherently favourable to the worker's work-life balance).
Gosh, it's almost as if there's someone more important in life than fucking work for a corporate overlord.
Seriously, are Americans REALLY this fucking stupid in general?
P.S. In terms of productivity per hour or even per dollar, chances are that the EU wins. But let your employer brainwash you into working, if you wish.
And it's an opt-out. You can't be forced to do it, nor do you have to do anything special in order to operate within the specified bounds, as that''s the "expected norm", if you like.
You run a huge operation, with thousands of users and millions of dollars flowing through it.
At which point do you need to stop and think "Actually, I need a server that does NOTHING but authentication, isolated from everything else?"
Literally a machine that can only communicate Yes or No and maybe a tiny token and every communication to it can only be replied to by yes, no, or issue of a temporary token (which can only be verified by the same machine answering yes or no).
Changing passwords is a rare, deliberate, easy-to-audit and unusual act - you could literally have a guy who has to press a button to okay each such action. Apart from that, an application has absolutely no need to do anything more than pass on info to a server that can reply yes or no. Whether that's from a initial password login, or checking a temporary token issued, that's all it needs to do.
It's not the be-all-and-end-all - you can compromise the interface and wait for a user to log on and thus capture a successful transaction - but this outright theft of every login detail and a list of things that, given time, can be turned back into passwords shouldn't be happening, should it?
I mean, quite literally, a serial cable should be able to handle such information on the scale of a half-decent sized website. Is this user 1's password? No. This is what user 2 claims his password is, can I get a token for that valid for the next hour? Is this token valid for user 2? What more beyond that do you need to program against to authenticate absolutely anything imaginable?
And even password updates - they operate on the same principle as the way that admins cannot see their user's passwords. We can update them, but we can't actually see what they were and the very act of updating them locks out (and therefore alerts) the genuine user.
Isolate this stuff. Seriously. An entire network that is air-gapped from your real network and literally the applications either side can ONLY communicate over a protocol that contains the bare minimum of commands. You could do it with an embedded device. Why are places with millions of dollars of business storing anything on a device that can be read back en-masse by even their own staff, let alone a compromised machine on the company's office network or similar?
Any employee in the EU who *allows* those employees in the US to do such a thing is breaking the law too. UK Data Protection Act applies here, and has personally liability for them.
So even if the US courts all get together, agree, make the US based company do it, the EU-based company are LEGALLY REQUIRED to block any and all attempts to do so to preserve EU data protection.
In the EU, you have to get legally-binding agreements from the companies involved before you store data with them - government, medical, educational, you name it. Those agreements basically state that the data CANNOT leave the EU. They, themselves, are merely a clarification of EU law anyway, as the Data Protection laws apply.
(P.S. Apple does not give these guarantees for their cloud services, btw! Google, Dropbox, etc. do).
As such, any EU employee who ASSISTS or even ALLOWS such promised-protection on data to be bypassed is personally liable (with jail time possible) under the law of the country they live and work in. It can't happen.
The US are beating a dead-horse here, having exhausted all legal avenues, and are trying to make an impossible order that - even if passed - will not be possible to comply with anyway.
Literally, MS Ireland would have to pull the plug on any access from the US by their employees if this goes through, no matter what agreements they may have between the two distinct companies. And anyone who even left an avenue open for such things will end up in jail in the EU.
"You see this in some other situations too, where you can be arrested in one country because of things you did in another."
Yes. That's called an international co-operative agreement. Done by going through the courts on both sides and having one court agree to co-operate with another.
That's not what this is.
This is Company A being told to give up data belonging to Company B (which isn't them) because Company B is in County B and holds some data of interest to Country A.
Rather than Court A speaking to Court B and getting an order to make Company B produce the data, they are suing Company A in Country A for failing to make Company B break County B's laws.
That's NOT how jurisdiction works. You cannot, technically, have multiple jurisdiction. However, the court with jurisdiction over the physical presence of a person/company can be asked to co-operate and provide them to another jurisdiction - subject to the people in question having done something that's illegal in that other jurisdiction, and important enough to bother.
This is Pepsi in the US being told to give up Coke's data in the EU because the US wants it. They are either separate entities (subject to different jurisdictions and distinct from each other) [Correct answer, by the way] or they are the same entity (operating in two jurisdictions, under two systems of law, being told to break one law to fulfill another).
Whichever way it's spun, it's not feasible for them to comply in any meaningful way. And the various places that might claim to have jurisdiction have to come to an agreement, NOT forcing that company to comply with anything and everything just because they think it applies.
If Microsoft (US) are doing business in the EU that you think you can subject to US jurisdiction, you NEED an EU court to agree with that. If correct, that will happen. If not, it won't.
Then suing Microsoft (US) for failing to comply is actually ILLEGAL based on many established legal systems as there is no way for them to legally comply.
It's the wrong decision, the wrong venue, the wrong company, the wrong jurisdiction, the wrong procedure even if it weren't, and the wrong demand to make of them. But apart from that, it's tickety-boo.
The ROM's on early-80's consoles are still, on the whole, perfectly readable (as evidenced by MAME), and they don't even TRY to use error correcting codes to ensure resiliency.
I have CompactFlash of some vintage and it's all still perfectly readable. Even hard drives are quite readable if stored properly and not live for a long time.
I imagine if you really wanted to make something last 20 years and still be readable, a basic EEPROM with I2C-like serial interface will be readable, and you could probably describe a circuit/timing to read from it on the casing of the chip itself with one diagram.
You think shampoo is entering your skin? Soap? Alcohol when you rub it on a wound (it might enter the blood through the wound, but through the skin)? Iodine before surgery? Paint? PVA glue? The water when you shower? Felt-tip? Oh no! Sweat is entering my skin!
Moron.
Nicotine patches are RECENT and have to be specially developed. You can't just slap a cigarette on your arm and hope the nicotine penetrates. It doesn't work like that.
P.S. Water is a chemical. Your use of the word "chemical" tells me exactly what kind of idiot you are.
Additionally, you could rub liquid-suspended asbestos on your skin. Chances are you'll die of skin cancer because you didn't block the sun before you die of lung cancer because of what you were using.
If you can't eat it - I assume that you never shower, bathe, brush teeth, gargle or apply medical dressings. You're chances of dying because of THOSE things not being done is probably greater than any other risk.
These people are operating in London. If all they need to do is murder someone (Litvinenko) and rush to the nearest embassy to get themselves LEGALLY extracted / sheltered from the host country despite being a criminal, that's what will happen.
As it is, the Litvinenko killers got away with it, because they couldn't be tracked in time. But if all they needed to do was drive to the Russian embassy, get asylum and then be "untouchable" until people got bored of it or it cost to much, there would be a lot more of that kind of thing.
You're assuming pickpockets and thieves. Who cares? I'm assuming murderers, spies, assassins, etc.
I have to say - necessary compile environments really put me off coding projects.
Just having a Makefile is not sufficient. Even having all the right versions of prerequisite libraries isn't sufficient. Sometimes you have to patch and tweak and pass parameters and all kinds us to build the damn thing properly.
Lots of software is like this. Especially when you work on a non-standard platform, even ARM, or with certain libraries (ffmpeg! grr!).
Let's not even get into what happens when it compiles against some ancient version of an obscure library even if it barely uses it.
We really need a way to specify this kind of thing. There needs to be an XML format with namespaces that specify - down to the version, source file and original location - what the original prerequisites were for each particular build. Hopefully that's what they are working towards.
P.S. This is a MASSIVE killer for teaching programming students. Introduce them to C, everything is fine. Get them to compile against a particular library - even SDL which is quite portable - and you can be in for a world of hurt. Compile on something unusual like MinGW and you're back to the command line hand-compiling some of these libraries with dozens of switches and path-overrides just to compile a simple Hello World example.
The percentages on the Register for 10 last week were 5%. 8.0 has that. 8.1 has twice that. XP had about the same as 8.1. The rest was basically 7.
And given that it's a free upgrade from 7 or 8, that's pretty telling even at this early stage.
To be honest, why would you upgrade from 7? It's still in support and still runs EXACTLY the same set of programs on EXACTLY the same hardware. There is no real selling point to 8 or 10.
P.S. Hate me all you like, I've deployed Microsoft networks as a living for the last 15 years. Some things they do are good. Others are absolutely shite. Disagree with my opinion, that's what the friends/foes functionality is for. But you can also discuss it, that's what the forum is for.
Microsoft can't force people to install Windows on new machines like they used to. It used to be in their favour to force people onto Windows because they could hold up the ENTIRE PC market by refusing.
Now that power isn't anywhere near what it used to be, and people don't really care if they have 7, 8 or 10 on their machine, they can't dictate the market. It used to be that Microsoft determined when you upgraded your PC and when the market was flooded with new PC's. No longer. Surface showed that.
And that's a lot down to the death of the old-fashioned PC... Windows tablets are a flop, really, and Windows phones are even worse - at least the tablet is running "Windows as you know it" and not "Windows CE 2".
People have always thought that Windows was "free" with their PC. Because it was always bundled so tightly you couldn't buy Linux PC's. Now that Android, and Chromebooks and even Apple devices have snuck in via other avenues that Microsoft found themselves unable to control, they have little choice. And their "The PC comes with Windows" has come back to bite them because now the PC industry are just saying "Nobody is going to pay THAT for a PC with Windows... you have to make Windows cheaper".
To the point that MS has had to move Office to direct-payment-to-Microsoft rather than pre-loading on your PC. Office 365 is already installed, you just have to pay Microsoft a monthly fee direct that PC manufacturers don't see a penny of (I'm sure they get SOMETHING for bundling the pre-installers though).
Microsoft's value was always only in their two main pieces of software. One of those they have set a precedent of giving away now. The other is a monthly fee that - over a year - doesn't cover the cost of one of the old versions of Office. And you can install up to five copies of it for a single purchase, which you didn't used to be able to do, and they have to provide cloud services, integration and automatic upgrades for that cost too.
IE is dead. Even MS don't use it now. Silverlight doesn't work in Chrome since the last version, they haven't bothered to update their plugins to Pepper API.
What else do they have? The death of Microsoft is long, protracted and pretty silent. They never made it in any other market - music players, tablets (there was Windows XP for Tablet PC many, many, many years ago - it's not like they haven't had time to fix it), phones, etc.
MS will become a software provider, and even just SaaS eventually. Which is where they should be. That's their prime strength. And if they don't start competing there with other offerings (e.g. Google Docs, etc.) then they will be shoved out of that market too.
A lot of this is nothing to do with their management now, but their mismanagement then. They have had to radically change how they do business to compete only on their strengths rather than muscling in illegally. Yet only two of their products are strengths, and one of those they are rapidly getting a bad reputation for (8, 8.1, 10).
I can't say they don't deserve it.
Kinda reminds me of RM in the UK education sector.
Sorry, but a lot of it is obvious (don't stomp over other rooms, etc.). A lot of it has been around for decades. And I was writing things to do this over 20 years ago for HOBBY projects, so I'm damn sure anyone who needs to write these sorts of things can find the material online, come up with it themselves, and/or already knows it.
Honestly, "geek site" does not equate to "let's just regurgitate 20 year old articles on the basis of programming that people were doing back in the 1980's". The EXACT opposite.
Fuck, I'm pretty sure the Marshal Cavendish INPUT magazine I read back in the 80's - aimed at kids - describes this sort of shit, and more, and is at least 50% assembly language of various kinds (6502, Z80, etc.). This would barely rate a full page article from thousands, with some BASIC example code, in a weekly series, aimed at teaching kids programming, 20 years ago.
Additionally, smelly farm air is exactly what our noses and lungs have dealt with for millions of years. Excrement, grass, mud, soil, etc.
Now we have things much finer, much more damaging, non-degrading, synthetic, toxic, etc. and shockingly our lungs can't cope with it. Even household dust no longer has anywhere near the same make-up as it used to.
"Dirt", "grass", "mud", etc. on the floor isn't what will kill your kid. It'll be the "clean air" they live in 24 hours a day next to the road, inside their double-glazing, with no filter between them and the cars and shit outside, and those fucking anti-bacterial wipes.
The algebras you mentioned (of which one is subset of the other - do YOU know what they are?) require a grounding in algebra. In the UK, "school" means up to age 16 (now up to 18, but whatever). You can't teach that kind of stuff without basic algebra, which pushes it into A-Level (which used to be the "optional" 16-18 education). Thus we're not talking about kids who are missing out on advanced algebras - that's for them to do when they've all done the basics and some choose to do more of it.
Go look up GCSE mathematics. There's algebra. Maybe not ALL algebras but some. Now go look up GCSE ICT. There's pathetically little coding. Almost zero. Fuck, a word macro qualifies with some exam boards.
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That's just scumbaggery of the highest order, and you're not the first to report it.
Fuck you, AVG, and I was someone who sent dozens, if not hundreds of people your way over the years by my recommendations - and not just "free" users.
Comodo are my current "least hated" equivalent, but even they are doing some funky shit with their shellcode injection options being active EVEN WHEN DISABLED and interfering with things like the newest versions of Chrome being able to load successfully. Shit like that shouldn't happen if I've turned the option off - god knows how many random blue-screens and crashes that accounts for world-wide and nobody would suspect their firewall/antivirus of interfering in programs in that manner.
How I read this:
"Company releases tool that utilises its competitor's openness in order to suck in your data into a system that doesn't have that same ease of transfer functionality in return."
It sounds very much like a one-way-street to me. But I don't use Apple, except in my job, so I may be unaware of some great export tool that makes it really easy to bring all your contacts etc. out of an Apple device to put it in standardised formats for you that need anything but the device you're using to export from and some storage device?
The nearest I can see on a quick Google is to iCloud them, then from a computer with iCloud Contacts (which might require Outlook or Mac software?) to manually export a vCard which you can then import somewhere else on your own. The other FAQ's I've stumbled across for this imply things like syncing to a computer and/or installing third-party apps.
Tell me... do you want to migrate to a system that's REALLY easy to migrate into from others, but doesn't offer that in return?
I work in schools.
I work IT in schools.
I work exclusively in schools.
I've only ever worked in schools.
I've worked in private and state, primary, secondary, further education, and after-school tuition centres.
Computers are a tool. Like a pen, a textbook, a folder, a table, a desk, or anything else.
Use them properly and they can help make things more efficient. That includes teaching. Use them improperly, buy them "for show", or think they'll work some magic on their own and you'll be disappointed.
In the same way that signing in 30 kids every morning and again in the afternoon takes ten minutes with pen and paper and lots of shuffling paper and people involved, but electronic registers take seconds and everyone who needs to can see the results instantly. It's a tool. Use it properly and it works.
What it does NOT do is teach kids. That's what teachers do (or at least are supposed to do). A teacher with an electronic timetable, who knows how to use it, is more productive and gets more time to teach than those who are shuffling bits of paper around multiple room. A teacher who can share his document with the kids and get a collaborative result, even as part of homework without themselves being present, can work wonders.
But what makes it work is the teacher. Not the tool. Give a carpenter or wood craftsman a cheap chisel and he can still produce a work of art. Give him the right tools and they'll be more refined and better quality and take less time. But give a chisel to a monkey and you won't get a mahogany table out of it. Computers are no different - a tool for professionals.
The misconception is that somehow computers on their own magically transform the most mediocre of teachers into teaching geniuses with wonderfully attentive students. It's not true.
I work in IT in schools, it's all I know and all I've ever done. Remove the IT and good teachers will still thrive and bad teachers still fail. Remove the teachers and the IT is next to fucking useless. Bear in mind that I spend vast portions of my working life at opposition to these people, that many schools have a large "teacher/non-teacher" divide that rarely gets crossed, socially or otherwise. That these people are the bane of my life.
But still, it's the teachers that make the difference, and the way they teach. And if we can get all the crap and paperwork and tracking and other shit out of their way as much as possible, they will have more time to teach kids. It's literally an admin task. Bringing tech into the classroom "just because" is dangerous and stupid.
The right teacher with the right tool can work wonders. But it's not the tool that's doing it. It's not the chisel that's so wonderful that it's making works of art. It's the way it's put to use.
In the UK, schools have been expected to get in computers to meet official ratios (X computers per Y pupils). That's fucking ludicrous. They have been expected to make use of things "just because" they are there. They have been expected to fully kit out every classroom no matter the subject or how little used. We have parents who are able to use their kids school iPads as a status symbol amongst over parents in other schools. We have teachers performing death-by-powerpoint thinking it improves their teaching. It does not.
But computers still have a place. They are merely an automation tool. A machine. That removes the repetitive burden of filling out a thousand school reports in twenty subjects. That allows the kids to manipulate 3D objects that I couldn't even get my computer to DRAW on the screen when I was a kid.
The problem is that people think that every app on the appstores, every website they are sold, every resource available must be used for every god-damn thing. Teachers BUY lesson plans, in big books, on what apps to use and what services to sign up to, and what looks cool to senior management. And so some of them have actually stopped teaching.
I've been fortunate enough
I would seriously worry about someone who could approach work in the manner you prescribe - there are good jobs and bad jobs, and the purpose of all is to pay for leisure. The number of people who can find ALL of their leisure at work is vanishingly small, literally the billionaires who can do what they like. Are you seriously suggesting that if you were to win the lottery and never needed to work again, you'd be in the office before 9am every day until retirement age still?
The rest of the jobs - sure, you might enjoy them, but if you are PICKING your job, you're already part of the privileged few. I speak as one of those people, incidentally, after running a business for over 10 years and then doing it as a full-time paid job afterwards.
There are very, very, very, very few jobs that are desirable to the few people who can do them, to such an extent that they'd choose to do them even if there was no need for recompense.
Having a passion for you job is great. It's also - from my experience - the cause of so many burn-outs and disappointments that it's actually a warning sign. If someone's in the office long past their hours for no real necessary reason, it's a big, large, flashing, red warning. Something is wrong at home, or something is wrong at work. The longer that persists, the more dangerous it is.
It doesn't mean you can't do your job properly, professionally, with enthusiasm, and go above and beyond... it's that it's literally just that - a job (work, chore, labour, task, these are all synonyms),
You get no brownie points for staying late, I promise you, no matter what's said. Especially when you're not actually any more productive by doing so. If your work is so great that it's your leisure, then you're likely to lose both when circumstances change. Unless you're the CEO, those circumstances WILL change.
But I've seen too many people burned-out and making themselves ill for a *work atmosphere* they love, or a *company* they love or a *skill* they love, and end up realising that it's not the *job* they love at all.
It's not about working with stuff you hate. It's that you'll never work with all the stuff you love as the only part of your job. Vets spend most of their time killing the animals they are trying to care for. Doctors, in watching people get sick and die. IT guys spend most of their time trying to make things that were deliberately designed not to work together, work together. And so on. Add on paperwork and compliance and health & safety and all that stuff that surrounds the things you DO want to do (nobody - NOBODY - wants to be enjoying a job doing that kind of legwork) and it's a mess.
Don't hate your job. Just don't live SOLELY for it. Because one tick of a HR button and you've lost vast portions of your life.
Sounds like what you really want is a smoke system connected to the alarm.
Rather than alarms (which do nothing unless they alarm someone who's guaranteed to come running in time - let's be honest, a text to your phone or a friendly neighbour is more useful here than any amount of law enforcement, security companies or loud blaring alarms annoying your neighbours), you want to stop someone in their tracks.
Connect smoke system and, in your average untargetted burglary, it's then not really possible to steal anything in time. Alarm goes off, home fills with smoke, you can't see shit and you're so "alarmed" by that that you run off.
Dogs can be ignored, if you have the right approach. Hell, a sausage from a stranger will tame just about any beast that you're choosing to keep near your kids at night.
CCTV is useless... even when it captures, it doesn't stop. And most of the time it won't capture. I've supplied CCTV to police any number of times in my job and when neighbours were burgled. They were singularly useless as everyone looks the same in a hoodie and cap, and not at all suspicious walking around the local areas.
Alarms are useless except to alert YOU to the problem. That may or may not be useful but chances are that the peace of mind that you get a text even if something's smashed when nobody notices during the day is enough. And when it goes off, you can ring a friend to pop round, or phone the neighbour to ask if they could have a look. At least you might end up with a witness or a car plate or scaring them off, though.
But a smoke system - unless they KNOW it's present and bring night-vision or something - stops them and actually prevents them even in a smash-and-grab.
The problem with security is that people do what they think works, rather than what actually works. Literally, sneak into your own house and see how crap most camera placement, etc. is if you were prepared to just cover up and smash a window.
Make your place look secure. Make it look more effort than it's worth. Don't leave expensive shit on show. Lock doors. Don't buy cheap tacky signs and fake plastic cameras. And twitch the curtains once in a while if you see people stopping in cars outside - they may well be reccying the place. And if you want to actually STOP the crime in progress, or be alerted to a crime in progress, deploy a system that does that.
CCTV is only useful for after-the-event, for insurance purposes and things like that.
Much better to put in decent window locks and get in the habit of double-locking doors and costing them every few seconds you can than almost anything else.
Neighbours on both sides of my house have been burgled in the last year. I'm not claiming infallibility here, but access to my house/garden just LOOKS in a totally different class. They had no garden gate, unprotected side-alleys into the back of the house, had left a window at the back open (even if it was tiny) while they were out, old broken windows out front, etc. The neighbour was FOLLOWED HOME from the local train station after attending a religious event covered head-to-toe in their family gold and DID NOTHING TO REPORT IT, despite being worried for their children immediately afterwards. The next day, they were broken into and only the gold was stolen.
A few days after that, they were back banging on the doors and bothering their children who were home alone to try to get them to open the door. Nobody thought to phone police and/or yell for help from neighbours until hours later (or at all in the latter case!).
However, at no point, did the culprits walk within shot of anything to do with my CCTV system. We know, because the police asked for it, and there was nothing. They'd obviously reccied and decided exactly how they were going to do it, including jumping a small garden fence so that they didn't need to walk down my neighbour's path (covered by my CCTV) to approach their house.
And they knew enough to steer clear of the house with live CCTV
The problem is really: Do you want to be managing this stuff yourself? I know, when I get home, the last thing I want to happen is some problem with a security system that I'm the only one who knows how to fix.
There's no harm in joining modules, but doing everything from integration to day-to-day tasks on a computer that you'll have to manage? That's a pain in the butt.
It's the same with electronics - some of this stuff is cheap and easy to make, but the hassle of doing so compared to a tiny purchase for a support product is rarely worth the hassle. I have set up motion-capture cameras that send me the footage to my phone using systems like "motion". But the day I saw a 1Tb DVR with 8 CCTV camera in-ports, 8 audio-in ports, VGA out, smartphone control and four day/night cameras with all the cabling, for less than the price of a tablet computer, it was a no-brainer. And I can just set it and leave it and be assured that it'll be running overnight. Hell, the only thing I can envision happening is drive-failure and it has email warning for that even if the drive can't boot.
The question is really what you want to achieve and whether you want a zero-management solution, or whether you're after a hobbyist security project with lots of tinkering and testing and times when it falls over because of something unaccounted for? Most people want the first option.
The beauty of self-delusion is that you only have to convince yourself.
Honestly, there isn't a European country that does, or would want to, work as long or for as little recompense (monetary or otherwise) as the US does. And the best bit is that your companies have you belief this is your choice!
Europeans strikes are legendary. They cost at least one British Prime Minister her job, even in a dying industry. They're still going on to this day, in just about every industry imaginable. Union representation is high and actually one of the main political parties in the UK has run the country only because it's backed by worker's unions.
Europeans view work as... the necessary evil to earn money to enjoy the rest of your life (the other 2/3rds of the working day - 1/3rd of which is SLEEP! - and the holidays and weekends). Sure, there are a handful of workaholics but it's not really aspired to in any way, shape or form. And when the work isn't suitable or fair, we actually stop working, and demand laws to make it fair.
Just off the top of my head in the UK, coal miner's strikes, Ford Dagenham plant, the rail system, statutory parental leave (including paternal), and zero-hours contracts. All resulted in fairer working laws which almost always worked in the favour of the workers, not the employer. The French are on strike over pay and conditions in the Eurotunnel - even before the latest migrant problems.
(P.S. I'm extraordinarily anti-union, because it brings my country's services to a halt whenever someone feels there's a grievance... but you can't say for a second that the UK law isn't inherently favourable to the worker's work-life balance).
Gosh, it's almost as if there's someone more important in life than fucking work for a corporate overlord.
Seriously, are Americans REALLY this fucking stupid in general?
P.S. In terms of productivity per hour or even per dollar, chances are that the EU wins. But let your employer brainwash you into working, if you wish.
And it's an opt-out. You can't be forced to do it, nor do you have to do anything special in order to operate within the specified bounds, as that''s the "expected norm", if you like.
It still gets me.
You run a huge operation, with thousands of users and millions of dollars flowing through it.
At which point do you need to stop and think "Actually, I need a server that does NOTHING but authentication, isolated from everything else?"
Literally a machine that can only communicate Yes or No and maybe a tiny token and every communication to it can only be replied to by yes, no, or issue of a temporary token (which can only be verified by the same machine answering yes or no).
Changing passwords is a rare, deliberate, easy-to-audit and unusual act - you could literally have a guy who has to press a button to okay each such action. Apart from that, an application has absolutely no need to do anything more than pass on info to a server that can reply yes or no. Whether that's from a initial password login, or checking a temporary token issued, that's all it needs to do.
It's not the be-all-and-end-all - you can compromise the interface and wait for a user to log on and thus capture a successful transaction - but this outright theft of every login detail and a list of things that, given time, can be turned back into passwords shouldn't be happening, should it?
I mean, quite literally, a serial cable should be able to handle such information on the scale of a half-decent sized website. Is this user 1's password? No. This is what user 2 claims his password is, can I get a token for that valid for the next hour? Is this token valid for user 2? What more beyond that do you need to program against to authenticate absolutely anything imaginable?
And even password updates - they operate on the same principle as the way that admins cannot see their user's passwords. We can update them, but we can't actually see what they were and the very act of updating them locks out (and therefore alerts) the genuine user.
Isolate this stuff. Seriously. An entire network that is air-gapped from your real network and literally the applications either side can ONLY communicate over a protocol that contains the bare minimum of commands. You could do it with an embedded device. Why are places with millions of dollars of business storing anything on a device that can be read back en-masse by even their own staff, let alone a compromised machine on the company's office network or similar?
Next time, stick a up-to-$50 device/software in there somewhere to monitor and limit and thus make sure it can't happen again.
Hell, you might even have spotted it earlier and stopped it before it became a problem.
UK=EU, I mean. I'm in the UK, but the Data Protection laws are basically the same throughout.
Any employee in the EU who *allows* those employees in the US to do such a thing is breaking the law too. UK Data Protection Act applies here, and has personally liability for them.
So even if the US courts all get together, agree, make the US based company do it, the EU-based company are LEGALLY REQUIRED to block any and all attempts to do so to preserve EU data protection.
In the EU, you have to get legally-binding agreements from the companies involved before you store data with them - government, medical, educational, you name it. Those agreements basically state that the data CANNOT leave the EU. They, themselves, are merely a clarification of EU law anyway, as the Data Protection laws apply.
(P.S. Apple does not give these guarantees for their cloud services, btw! Google, Dropbox, etc. do).
As such, any EU employee who ASSISTS or even ALLOWS such promised-protection on data to be bypassed is personally liable (with jail time possible) under the law of the country they live and work in. It can't happen.
The US are beating a dead-horse here, having exhausted all legal avenues, and are trying to make an impossible order that - even if passed - will not be possible to comply with anyway.
Literally, MS Ireland would have to pull the plug on any access from the US by their employees if this goes through, no matter what agreements they may have between the two distinct companies. And anyone who even left an avenue open for such things will end up in jail in the EU.
"You see this in some other situations too, where you can be arrested in one country because of things you did in another."
Yes. That's called an international co-operative agreement. Done by going through the courts on both sides and having one court agree to co-operate with another.
That's not what this is.
This is Company A being told to give up data belonging to Company B (which isn't them) because Company B is in County B and holds some data of interest to Country A.
Rather than Court A speaking to Court B and getting an order to make Company B produce the data, they are suing Company A in Country A for failing to make Company B break County B's laws.
That's NOT how jurisdiction works. You cannot, technically, have multiple jurisdiction. However, the court with jurisdiction over the physical presence of a person/company can be asked to co-operate and provide them to another jurisdiction - subject to the people in question having done something that's illegal in that other jurisdiction, and important enough to bother.
This is Pepsi in the US being told to give up Coke's data in the EU because the US wants it. They are either separate entities (subject to different jurisdictions and distinct from each other) [Correct answer, by the way] or they are the same entity (operating in two jurisdictions, under two systems of law, being told to break one law to fulfill another).
Whichever way it's spun, it's not feasible for them to comply in any meaningful way. And the various places that might claim to have jurisdiction have to come to an agreement, NOT forcing that company to comply with anything and everything just because they think it applies.
If Microsoft (US) are doing business in the EU that you think you can subject to US jurisdiction, you NEED an EU court to agree with that. If correct, that will happen. If not, it won't.
Then suing Microsoft (US) for failing to comply is actually ILLEGAL based on many established legal systems as there is no way for them to legally comply.
It's the wrong decision, the wrong venue, the wrong company, the wrong jurisdiction, the wrong procedure even if it weren't, and the wrong demand to make of them. But apart from that, it's tickety-boo.
If they don't comply, the US authorities will sue them.
If they do comply, the EU and the rest of the world's authorities will sue them.
That's an impossible legal situation that should never arise, ever. That's why jurisdiction exists.
And they have the cheek to say that China etc. are overbearing and overstepping the mark to spy on their citizens...
Memory chips.
The ROM's on early-80's consoles are still, on the whole, perfectly readable (as evidenced by MAME), and they don't even TRY to use error correcting codes to ensure resiliency.
I have CompactFlash of some vintage and it's all still perfectly readable. Even hard drives are quite readable if stored properly and not live for a long time.
I imagine if you really wanted to make something last 20 years and still be readable, a basic EEPROM with I2C-like serial interface will be readable, and you could probably describe a circuit/timing to read from it on the casing of the chip itself with one diagram.
You could RTFA where it answers you.
Dickhead.
You think shampoo is entering your skin? Soap? Alcohol when you rub it on a wound (it might enter the blood through the wound, but through the skin)? Iodine before surgery? Paint? PVA glue? The water when you shower? Felt-tip? Oh no! Sweat is entering my skin!
Moron.
Nicotine patches are RECENT and have to be specially developed. You can't just slap a cigarette on your arm and hope the nicotine penetrates. It doesn't work like that.
P.S. Water is a chemical. Your use of the word "chemical" tells me exactly what kind of idiot you are.
Additionally, you could rub liquid-suspended asbestos on your skin. Chances are you'll die of skin cancer because you didn't block the sun before you die of lung cancer because of what you were using.
If you can't eat it - I assume that you never shower, bathe, brush teeth, gargle or apply medical dressings. You're chances of dying because of THOSE things not being done is probably greater than any other risk.
Mafia.
Russian assassins.
These people are operating in London. If all they need to do is murder someone (Litvinenko) and rush to the nearest embassy to get themselves LEGALLY extracted / sheltered from the host country despite being a criminal, that's what will happen.
As it is, the Litvinenko killers got away with it, because they couldn't be tracked in time. But if all they needed to do was drive to the Russian embassy, get asylum and then be "untouchable" until people got bored of it or it cost to much, there would be a lot more of that kind of thing.
You're assuming pickpockets and thieves. Who cares? I'm assuming murderers, spies, assassins, etc.
I have to say - necessary compile environments really put me off coding projects.
Just having a Makefile is not sufficient. Even having all the right versions of prerequisite libraries isn't sufficient. Sometimes you have to patch and tweak and pass parameters and all kinds us to build the damn thing properly.
Lots of software is like this. Especially when you work on a non-standard platform, even ARM, or with certain libraries (ffmpeg! grr!).
Let's not even get into what happens when it compiles against some ancient version of an obscure library even if it barely uses it.
We really need a way to specify this kind of thing. There needs to be an XML format with namespaces that specify - down to the version, source file and original location - what the original prerequisites were for each particular build. Hopefully that's what they are working towards.
P.S. This is a MASSIVE killer for teaching programming students. Introduce them to C, everything is fine. Get them to compile against a particular library - even SDL which is quite portable - and you can be in for a world of hurt. Compile on something unusual like MinGW and you're back to the command line hand-compiling some of these libraries with dozens of switches and path-overrides just to compile a simple Hello World example.
The percentages on the Register for 10 last week were 5%. 8.0 has that. 8.1 has twice that. XP had about the same as 8.1. The rest was basically 7.
And given that it's a free upgrade from 7 or 8, that's pretty telling even at this early stage.
To be honest, why would you upgrade from 7? It's still in support and still runs EXACTLY the same set of programs on EXACTLY the same hardware. There is no real selling point to 8 or 10.
P.S. Hate me all you like, I've deployed Microsoft networks as a living for the last 15 years. Some things they do are good. Others are absolutely shite. Disagree with my opinion, that's what the friends/foes functionality is for. But you can also discuss it, that's what the forum is for.
Microsoft can't force people to install Windows on new machines like they used to. It used to be in their favour to force people onto Windows because they could hold up the ENTIRE PC market by refusing.
Now that power isn't anywhere near what it used to be, and people don't really care if they have 7, 8 or 10 on their machine, they can't dictate the market. It used to be that Microsoft determined when you upgraded your PC and when the market was flooded with new PC's. No longer. Surface showed that.
And that's a lot down to the death of the old-fashioned PC... Windows tablets are a flop, really, and Windows phones are even worse - at least the tablet is running "Windows as you know it" and not "Windows CE 2".
People have always thought that Windows was "free" with their PC. Because it was always bundled so tightly you couldn't buy Linux PC's. Now that Android, and Chromebooks and even Apple devices have snuck in via other avenues that Microsoft found themselves unable to control, they have little choice. And their "The PC comes with Windows" has come back to bite them because now the PC industry are just saying "Nobody is going to pay THAT for a PC with Windows... you have to make Windows cheaper".
To the point that MS has had to move Office to direct-payment-to-Microsoft rather than pre-loading on your PC. Office 365 is already installed, you just have to pay Microsoft a monthly fee direct that PC manufacturers don't see a penny of (I'm sure they get SOMETHING for bundling the pre-installers though).
Microsoft's value was always only in their two main pieces of software. One of those they have set a precedent of giving away now. The other is a monthly fee that - over a year - doesn't cover the cost of one of the old versions of Office. And you can install up to five copies of it for a single purchase, which you didn't used to be able to do, and they have to provide cloud services, integration and automatic upgrades for that cost too.
IE is dead. Even MS don't use it now.
Silverlight doesn't work in Chrome since the last version, they haven't bothered to update their plugins to Pepper API.
What else do they have? The death of Microsoft is long, protracted and pretty silent. They never made it in any other market - music players, tablets (there was Windows XP for Tablet PC many, many, many years ago - it's not like they haven't had time to fix it), phones, etc.
MS will become a software provider, and even just SaaS eventually. Which is where they should be. That's their prime strength. And if they don't start competing there with other offerings (e.g. Google Docs, etc.) then they will be shoved out of that market too.
A lot of this is nothing to do with their management now, but their mismanagement then. They have had to radically change how they do business to compete only on their strengths rather than muscling in illegally. Yet only two of their products are strengths, and one of those they are rapidly getting a bad reputation for (8, 8.1, 10).
I can't say they don't deserve it.
Kinda reminds me of RM in the UK education sector.
Exactly my thoughts.
Sorry, but a lot of it is obvious (don't stomp over other rooms, etc.). A lot of it has been around for decades. And I was writing things to do this over 20 years ago for HOBBY projects, so I'm damn sure anyone who needs to write these sorts of things can find the material online, come up with it themselves, and/or already knows it.
Honestly, "geek site" does not equate to "let's just regurgitate 20 year old articles on the basis of programming that people were doing back in the 1980's". The EXACT opposite.
Fuck, I'm pretty sure the Marshal Cavendish INPUT magazine I read back in the 80's - aimed at kids - describes this sort of shit, and more, and is at least 50% assembly language of various kinds (6502, Z80, etc.). This would barely rate a full page article from thousands, with some BASIC example code, in a weekly series, aimed at teaching kids programming, 20 years ago.
Additionally, smelly farm air is exactly what our noses and lungs have dealt with for millions of years. Excrement, grass, mud, soil, etc.
Now we have things much finer, much more damaging, non-degrading, synthetic, toxic, etc. and shockingly our lungs can't cope with it. Even household dust no longer has anywhere near the same make-up as it used to.
"Dirt", "grass", "mud", etc. on the floor isn't what will kill your kid. It'll be the "clean air" they live in 24 hours a day next to the road, inside their double-glazing, with no filter between them and the cars and shit outside, and those fucking anti-bacterial wipes.
Degree in mathematics.
The algebras you mentioned (of which one is subset of the other - do YOU know what they are?) require a grounding in algebra. In the UK, "school" means up to age 16 (now up to 18, but whatever). You can't teach that kind of stuff without basic algebra, which pushes it into A-Level (which used to be the "optional" 16-18 education). Thus we're not talking about kids who are missing out on advanced algebras - that's for them to do when they've all done the basics and some choose to do more of it.
Go look up GCSE mathematics. There's algebra. Maybe not ALL algebras but some. Now go look up GCSE ICT. There's pathetically little coding. Almost zero. Fuck, a word macro qualifies with some exam boards.