Well, think about it... if making any fine-tuning adjustments to the damned thing can be done via some form of wireless connection, or by way of open heart surgery... which would you choose?
Honestly, having the ability to have it communicate with the outside world makes perfect sense. Having the damned thing have zero security on that path, that's utterly ridiculous.
The problem is so many of these things are just slapped in with no security, and just assume anybody communicating when them must be authorized.
I don't expect every company to build an OS.. that would pretty much mean we don't get any new devices and software ever.
But I do expect that companies not be so damned lazy when it comes to writing security, and that they be required to support OS updates and fix security holes... you can't just say "nope, you have to stay on an ancient and unpatched OS because we can't confirm our stuff still works". And if you can't, you should lose any certifications the device has.
I've been saying for years the makers of consumer electronics need to be held to a higher standard when it comes to security, and to actually have some liability for it.
The makers of medical devices and cars and the like need to be held to a significantly higher standard than that.
But companies just rush some crap out the door and walk away.
So essentially they're still using everyone as beta testers, releasing shitty untested software, hiding what updates actually do, and taking away our choice if we want to install this shit or not.
Sorry, Microsoft... we're not your damned beta testers.
This whole bullshit of "we're going to install Windows 10 on your machine whether you like it or not" has to go. At this point, you really can't trust that any given update from Microsoft isn't the one which is going to start installing Windows 10 and screw up you computer. And, as much as they seem to think otherwise, if it your computer.
Hey, Microsoft... why don't you shove Windows 10 up your ass, instead of trying to shove it up ours?
Any claims they make about security really only mean "we will capitulate to any government security agency".
If the ever-declining BlackBerry thinks doing this will sell their phones to consumers... well, that's why BB is ever-declining, because they've long since lost track of what consumers want.
To get out of this death valley we need to move from a development phase into a growth phase. At the same time we need to adapt our cost levels to the new situation.
We're losing money like mad and haven't yet figured out a workable business model, so in order to maintain executive bonuses we need to get rid of some people.
No it isn't stupid. You may think it sounds stupid - but that is due to your ignorance
That's OK, you're an AC and therefore I assume you're a moron.
Continuous time scales are fundamental to a number of navigation & economic operations.
You do understand that the navigation is ALSO intrinsically tied to the astronomical positioning of things, right?
That it causes problems for computers is a relatively modern problem. Keeping accurate track of the time as it relates to the actual sky has been with humans for thousands of years, and doesn't go away because some whiny idiots think it's inconvenient.
See, the problem is most people don't understand where our system of time keeping comes from or why it's important.
The reason we adjust for leap years and leap seconds is our calendar is a close approximation to our orbital period... but it's not exact.
At noon, on the day of a solstice or an equinox, the sun is in a known position in the sky. We use it for important things like navigation and timekeeping, and knowing when the hell things like eclipses, sun flares, high tides, and comets might happen... or that asteroid which might kill us.
It's a real physical property, which we kind of need to keep track of. It's NOT some thing you can say "oh, well, what does it matter if you're off by a couple of days?".
Leap seconds are an artifact of our timekeeping system, and actual physical properties of our orbit.
For the ITU to be voting on if we keep leap seconds is kind of like politicians voting to determine that pi==3... it has nothing to do with reality.
Like it or not, you have to solve the problem. You simply can't get a bunch of tech people on a damned committee getting together and saying "we're no longer having leap seconds". That's just stupid.
Ummm... so that when you move around with money they can record it even if they don't get to see it?
Basically cash ceases to be anonymous.
Walk into an airport... OK, Jane Doe is carrying the following bills and didn't declare them. Or later on when those bills end up in the pocket of a known drug dealer, you get arrested.
The RFID allows them to know how much money and which specific bills you have without giving you a vote in the process.
It's every surveillance supporter's wet dream, because it can be automated, cross referenced, and be done without you knowing about it.
Why? Good god... have you not been paying attention for the last 15 or 20 years?
You need to get your paranoia up to a healthy level for the world you live in. Because stuff which used to be fiction is now commonplace. And pretty much every government on the planet wants to do this stuff now.
Sites are smart enough to detect that I am using evasive tactics
That's what the back button is for.
If YOU want to trust those sites, go right ahead.. I don't care what websites you use or trust.
Me, those sites which tell me I need to run Javascript or allow cookies get added to my blocked lists, and I click the back button. The next time I click on a link to that site, the whole thing is blocked.
If I uninstall Java, Flash, and disable cookies, my goddam computer makes a nice fucking screen saver, and that's about it.
Then you use the web entirely dependent on shiny baubles and cat videos, and that is your problem.
I haven't allowed java or flash in a browser I own in years. I only selectively allow javascript and cookies. I need to trust a site AND really want their information to allow scripts, otherwise I don't give a damn.
I'm looking for information, not bloody video games and videos of idiots lighting themselves on fire.
But when one of these sites fucks up your computer, don't run around saying how tragic it is that letting sites run code has caused you problems.
Hockey players aren't forced to use sticks improvised from re-used household materials. Tennis rackets aren't reduced to whatever hardcover books the players can find laying around. Swimmers aren't required to don industry-standard street-wear.
No, but you can bet your ass that if a piece of equipment gave you an unfair mechanical advantage they sure as hell would change the rules.
Swimmers, for instance have been banned from wearing some full-body suits because the advantage they gave over others wasn't shaving off a tiny bit, they were shaving off a lot.
Show up at Wimbleton with something which gives you an extra 15% ball speed due to some mechanical trickery... and you can bet your ass they'd outlaw it.
Being the best of the best comes down to individual skill and training. When it comes down to "someone wearing/using this is 50% more likely to beat someone not wearing/using it when everything else is equal", that's precisely the stuff which gets banned.
What is your advice for how to quantify and qualify improving the user experience of an aging, fairly large,but also fairly niche, ERP product?
At a certain point, you have to realize this isn't a committee.
If the business decides they don't want to become hampered by an old and ugly interface, you bloody well tell your developers that's what's happening.
If it isn't policy, even if it is a good idea, if your developers can just say "we don't feel like it", it's never going to happen.
If you purely leave it up to them, they'll just work on features nobody gives a damn about.
This is kind of the function of management in a development organization -- at some point, you have to tell the developers you don't give a crap about what stuff they want to be playing with.
There's probably a lot of old titles people would still play if they could, and which can probably make some additional revenue from.
I can't remember if it was PS->PS2, or PS2->PS3... but essentially they achieved backwards compatibility by making the CPU for the previous generation the front-end processor for the new generation. The theory was backwards compatible was essentially free.
It's entirely plausible the PS4 can't emulate a PS3 fast enough... but I bet there's a lot of side scrollers and other classic PS2 games people would still love to play.
The brooms have been compared to high-tech drivers that allow amateur golfers to hit the ball as far as a pro
OK, where the hell can I get one of these? Is it rocket powered?
Kidding aside, I do agree that sometimes the technology reaches the point where it really provides an unfair advantage and buggers up the concept of a level playing field.
Snowden's advice about blocking ad networks for security purposes actually makes perfect sense.
Honestly, it has made perfect sense since the late 90s when you could get popup hell... time and time again, ad networks have been demonstrated to be completely not trustworthy.
From back in the day when your page would get stuck loading because it was waiting for some @)##! ad site to finish loading (remember why Mozilla added the "block images from this site", or the ability to refuse cookies?)... so popovers, popunders, misdirects, and a pretty long list of bad behavior.
How the hell it's taken this long for people to start realizing this I have no idea. It didn't become true because Snowden said it. It became true almost 20 years ago when ads started to pollute the internet, and hasn't ever stopped being true.
There's a reason many of us have disabled Flash for a VERY long time.
Me, I'd take pretty much anybody who says they work for an internet ad company and lock them in a cage with angry bears before I'd ever do anything so stupid as to trust them. Because you haven't been able to collectively trust them in almost 20 years.
Honestly, internet ads are about as trustworthy as having anonymous sex with strangers in parking lots littered with dirty needles; it's a terrible idea but people keep acting like it's the only way to keep the intertubes working.
Assume every single ad company is going to be lying, malicious dishonest people driven by greed and depraved indifference. Because enough of them are that you should.
Honestly? Stop letting arbitrary sites and their 3rd party partners run bloody scripts.
You don't go to an arbitrary website and essentially say "why you seem like a fine, upstanding web-site, by all means please execute some javascript and flash code".
Well, actually, people do it all the time. But it's been a stupid idea for the last 15 years. But for some reason the trust model of the internet continues to be built on doing exactly that.
The solution is to stop trusting the damned internet and letting every site run whatever code they and their ad partners think they feel they should.
Because, let's face it, the internet hasn't really been trustworthy in a VERY long time.
The same was true for DDT, agent orange, and thalidomide.
Failure to look for evidence doesn't mean it's safe, it means you have decided to assume it is safe, and then let people find out later if that is true.
It is equally anti-science to say "you have no evidence to the contrary therefore it is safe, neener neener".
The problem is that by the time we find out it's too damned late.
So if you want to buy the package which says "this product contains a GMO fish we we assume is safe,m but otherwise have no real evidence, then go right ahead. But I trust the companies making this stuff as much as I trust any other company -- I trust them to be greedy self serving assholes who want to maximize profits and not be particularly trustworthy in terms of product safety if they don't have to be.
This isn't anti-science hysteria, this is based on decades of seeing people rush in and say "oh gee, what could possibly go wrong" and then finding out later they should have done more study.
I was really hoping to see a representation of a representation of this... instead it's a link to an article where a guy says there's a thing and then links to two other things.
I remember when we used to have links to actual articles.
Yeah, one of the things we've heard cities do is make the length of yellow lights shorter so they can maximize revenue at the red-light cameras.
I once got an automated ticket for running a red light.
Essentially I was doing the speed limit (it was a 4 cylinder Jeep, speeding wasn't really an option)... when the light went yellow I was close enough to the intersection I had to decide if I would slam on my brakes and make a panic stop, or acknowledge no way in hell I can stop.
At the time I decided in the remaining 30 feet or so no way I could safely stop.
By the time I'd got 35-40 feet, the light had already changed to red. That triggered the threshold for the red-light camera... it doesn't care, you passed the line after it went red. There was less than 3 seconds between the yellow coming up and the red coming up, and not nearly enough space to stop in.
The problem with law enforcement by automation is there is zero room to say anything about it, or point out how the light was impossibly short.
And then people are left trying to explain how it simply wasn't getting the whole idea of what happened because it's a simple binary decision.
It's actually scary to see how short some yellow lights are, especially when there is a traffic camera involved. It's like they know damned well you have no chance in hell of stopping, but since it generates more revenue they should keep doing it.
With a human police officer I could say "look, I was here, I was going this fast, stopping would have been unsafe and dangerous". Instead you have a computer which spits out something which says you're guilty, and has no context for anything else.
Well, if the signs say "speed limit is x between the hours of y and z", and the ticket is issued at z+c... then the ticket isn't valid.
I'm not saying people don't speed (not even a little). But I will readily believe these things don't align with the law, and give tickets which are incorrect because they aren't accounting for time of day.
Often these are set up to just call everything a ticket, and collect extra revenue. If that's by policy or incompetence that's not always clear.
Well, you can be a terrorist however you choose, that's up to you.
But since most ordinary people aren't going to jump through all of those hoops to have every day encryption, that would have the effect of taking encryption away from non-technical people.
So, me, I'm in favor of Google and Apple putting encryption on and having no access to the key to decode it.
Having Apple and Google stop providing encryption is exactly what the spies and fascists want. That way everyone is insecure, and the use of encryption can be equated to being a terrorist. I'd rather see everyone use encryption all the time, and the spies can fuck off an get warrants from judges after showing probable cause... not just gathering everything and figuring out what to do with it later.
But having everyone expect to be spied on just in case? Yeah, show me your fucker papers, comrade.
That's not "free", that's the opposite of free. That's saying the government needs to be able to spy on everything you do without warrant or probable cause, and you should accept that.
If Americans are starting to think this, then America is pretty much screwed.
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Well, think about it ... if making any fine-tuning adjustments to the damned thing can be done via some form of wireless connection, or by way of open heart surgery ... which would you choose?
Honestly, having the ability to have it communicate with the outside world makes perfect sense. Having the damned thing have zero security on that path, that's utterly ridiculous.
The problem is so many of these things are just slapped in with no security, and just assume anybody communicating when them must be authorized.
I don't expect every company to build an OS .. that would pretty much mean we don't get any new devices and software ever.
But I do expect that companies not be so damned lazy when it comes to writing security, and that they be required to support OS updates and fix security holes ... you can't just say "nope, you have to stay on an ancient and unpatched OS because we can't confirm our stuff still works". And if you can't, you should lose any certifications the device has.
I've been saying for years the makers of consumer electronics need to be held to a higher standard when it comes to security, and to actually have some liability for it.
The makers of medical devices and cars and the like need to be held to a significantly higher standard than that.
But companies just rush some crap out the door and walk away.
Easily automated from anywhere in the world, hard to trace, and exploiting utterly useless security.
Honestly, this was pretty much inevitable.
The security of most consumer devices is pathetic and useless. The security of medical devices has known to be almost non-existent for years now.
Humans are not intrinsically honest. It's time to stop pretending they are.
So essentially they're still using everyone as beta testers, releasing shitty untested software, hiding what updates actually do, and taking away our choice if we want to install this shit or not.
Sorry, Microsoft ... we're not your damned beta testers.
This whole bullshit of "we're going to install Windows 10 on your machine whether you like it or not" has to go. At this point, you really can't trust that any given update from Microsoft isn't the one which is going to start installing Windows 10 and screw up you computer. And, as much as they seem to think otherwise, if it your computer.
Hey, Microsoft ... why don't you shove Windows 10 up your ass, instead of trying to shove it up ours?
BlackBerry rolled over to governments years ago.
Any claims they make about security really only mean "we will capitulate to any government security agency".
If the ever-declining BlackBerry thinks doing this will sell their phones to consumers ... well, that's why BB is ever-declining, because they've long since lost track of what consumers want.
We're losing money like mad and haven't yet figured out a workable business model, so in order to maintain executive bonuses we need to get rid of some people.
That's OK, you're an AC and therefore I assume you're a moron.
You do understand that the navigation is ALSO intrinsically tied to the astronomical positioning of things, right?
That it causes problems for computers is a relatively modern problem. Keeping accurate track of the time as it relates to the actual sky has been with humans for thousands of years, and doesn't go away because some whiny idiots think it's inconvenient.
See, the problem is most people don't understand where our system of time keeping comes from or why it's important.
The reason we adjust for leap years and leap seconds is our calendar is a close approximation to our orbital period ... but it's not exact.
At noon, on the day of a solstice or an equinox, the sun is in a known position in the sky. We use it for important things like navigation and timekeeping, and knowing when the hell things like eclipses, sun flares, high tides, and comets might happen ... or that asteroid which might kill us.
It's a real physical property, which we kind of need to keep track of. It's NOT some thing you can say "oh, well, what does it matter if you're off by a couple of days?".
Leap seconds are an artifact of our timekeeping system, and actual physical properties of our orbit.
For the ITU to be voting on if we keep leap seconds is kind of like politicians voting to determine that pi==3 ... it has nothing to do with reality.
Like it or not, you have to solve the problem. You simply can't get a bunch of tech people on a damned committee getting together and saying "we're no longer having leap seconds". That's just stupid.
Ummm ... so that when you move around with money they can record it even if they don't get to see it?
Basically cash ceases to be anonymous.
Walk into an airport ... OK, Jane Doe is carrying the following bills and didn't declare them. Or later on when those bills end up in the pocket of a known drug dealer, you get arrested.
The RFID allows them to know how much money and which specific bills you have without giving you a vote in the process.
It's every surveillance supporter's wet dream, because it can be automated, cross referenced, and be done without you knowing about it.
Why? Good god ... have you not been paying attention for the last 15 or 20 years?
You need to get your paranoia up to a healthy level for the world you live in. Because stuff which used to be fiction is now commonplace. And pretty much every government on the planet wants to do this stuff now.
That's what the back button is for.
If YOU want to trust those sites, go right ahead .. I don't care what websites you use or trust.
Me, those sites which tell me I need to run Javascript or allow cookies get added to my blocked lists, and I click the back button. The next time I click on a link to that site, the whole thing is blocked.
Then you use the web entirely dependent on shiny baubles and cat videos, and that is your problem.
I haven't allowed java or flash in a browser I own in years. I only selectively allow javascript and cookies. I need to trust a site AND really want their information to allow scripts, otherwise I don't give a damn.
I'm looking for information, not bloody video games and videos of idiots lighting themselves on fire.
But when one of these sites fucks up your computer, don't run around saying how tragic it is that letting sites run code has caused you problems.
No, but you can bet your ass that if a piece of equipment gave you an unfair mechanical advantage they sure as hell would change the rules.
Swimmers, for instance have been banned from wearing some full-body suits because the advantage they gave over others wasn't shaving off a tiny bit, they were shaving off a lot.
Show up at Wimbleton with something which gives you an extra 15% ball speed due to some mechanical trickery ... and you can bet your ass they'd outlaw it.
Being the best of the best comes down to individual skill and training. When it comes down to "someone wearing/using this is 50% more likely to beat someone not wearing/using it when everything else is equal", that's precisely the stuff which gets banned.
At a certain point, you have to realize this isn't a committee.
If the business decides they don't want to become hampered by an old and ugly interface, you bloody well tell your developers that's what's happening.
If it isn't policy, even if it is a good idea, if your developers can just say "we don't feel like it", it's never going to happen.
If you purely leave it up to them, they'll just work on features nobody gives a damn about.
This is kind of the function of management in a development organization -- at some point, you have to tell the developers you don't give a crap about what stuff they want to be playing with.
Most things with CD tried to be backwards compatibility, most things with cartridges not so much.
I'm pretty sure I know people who have several game consoles spanning a very long time .. like back to their Super Nintento.
No, but once you've bought it, if it still works and there are games you still like .. why just throw it away? You've already bought them.
And some times, what you really want to do is play that ancient version of Duck Hunt or whatever floats your boat.
There's probably a lot of old titles people would still play if they could, and which can probably make some additional revenue from.
I can't remember if it was PS->PS2, or PS2->PS3 ... but essentially they achieved backwards compatibility by making the CPU for the previous generation the front-end processor for the new generation. The theory was backwards compatible was essentially free.
It's entirely plausible the PS4 can't emulate a PS3 fast enough ... but I bet there's a lot of side scrollers and other classic PS2 games people would still love to play.
OK, where the hell can I get one of these? Is it rocket powered?
Kidding aside, I do agree that sometimes the technology reaches the point where it really provides an unfair advantage and buggers up the concept of a level playing field.
Honestly, it has made perfect sense since the late 90s when you could get popup hell ... time and time again, ad networks have been demonstrated to be completely not trustworthy.
From back in the day when your page would get stuck loading because it was waiting for some @)##! ad site to finish loading (remember why Mozilla added the "block images from this site", or the ability to refuse cookies?) ... so popovers, popunders, misdirects, and a pretty long list of bad behavior.
How the hell it's taken this long for people to start realizing this I have no idea. It didn't become true because Snowden said it. It became true almost 20 years ago when ads started to pollute the internet, and hasn't ever stopped being true.
There's a reason many of us have disabled Flash for a VERY long time.
Me, I'd take pretty much anybody who says they work for an internet ad company and lock them in a cage with angry bears before I'd ever do anything so stupid as to trust them. Because you haven't been able to collectively trust them in almost 20 years.
Honestly, internet ads are about as trustworthy as having anonymous sex with strangers in parking lots littered with dirty needles; it's a terrible idea but people keep acting like it's the only way to keep the intertubes working.
Assume every single ad company is going to be lying, malicious dishonest people driven by greed and depraved indifference. Because enough of them are that you should.
Honestly? Stop letting arbitrary sites and their 3rd party partners run bloody scripts.
You don't go to an arbitrary website and essentially say "why you seem like a fine, upstanding web-site, by all means please execute some javascript and flash code".
Well, actually, people do it all the time. But it's been a stupid idea for the last 15 years. But for some reason the trust model of the internet continues to be built on doing exactly that.
The solution is to stop trusting the damned internet and letting every site run whatever code they and their ad partners think they feel they should.
Because, let's face it, the internet hasn't really been trustworthy in a VERY long time.
The same was true for DDT, agent orange, and thalidomide.
Failure to look for evidence doesn't mean it's safe, it means you have decided to assume it is safe, and then let people find out later if that is true.
It is equally anti-science to say "you have no evidence to the contrary therefore it is safe, neener neener".
The problem is that by the time we find out it's too damned late.
So if you want to buy the package which says "this product contains a GMO fish we we assume is safe,m but otherwise have no real evidence, then go right ahead. But I trust the companies making this stuff as much as I trust any other company -- I trust them to be greedy self serving assholes who want to maximize profits and not be particularly trustworthy in terms of product safety if they don't have to be.
This isn't anti-science hysteria, this is based on decades of seeing people rush in and say "oh gee, what could possibly go wrong" and then finding out later they should have done more study.
Why, gee officer ... I had no idea you couldn't see my plate from the red-light camera ...
My guess ... from a certain angle it blocks the license plates -- no plate, no ticket. ;-)
I was really hoping to see a representation of a representation of this ... instead it's a link to an article where a guy says there's a thing and then links to two other things.
I remember when we used to have links to actual articles.
Yeah, one of the things we've heard cities do is make the length of yellow lights shorter so they can maximize revenue at the red-light cameras.
I once got an automated ticket for running a red light.
Essentially I was doing the speed limit (it was a 4 cylinder Jeep, speeding wasn't really an option) ... when the light went yellow I was close enough to the intersection I had to decide if I would slam on my brakes and make a panic stop, or acknowledge no way in hell I can stop.
At the time I decided in the remaining 30 feet or so no way I could safely stop.
By the time I'd got 35-40 feet, the light had already changed to red. That triggered the threshold for the red-light camera ... it doesn't care, you passed the line after it went red. There was less than 3 seconds between the yellow coming up and the red coming up, and not nearly enough space to stop in.
The problem with law enforcement by automation is there is zero room to say anything about it, or point out how the light was impossibly short.
And then people are left trying to explain how it simply wasn't getting the whole idea of what happened because it's a simple binary decision.
It's actually scary to see how short some yellow lights are, especially when there is a traffic camera involved. It's like they know damned well you have no chance in hell of stopping, but since it generates more revenue they should keep doing it.
With a human police officer I could say "look, I was here, I was going this fast, stopping would have been unsafe and dangerous". Instead you have a computer which spits out something which says you're guilty, and has no context for anything else.
Well, if the signs say "speed limit is x between the hours of y and z", and the ticket is issued at z+c ... then the ticket isn't valid.
I'm not saying people don't speed (not even a little). But I will readily believe these things don't align with the law, and give tickets which are incorrect because they aren't accounting for time of day.
Often these are set up to just call everything a ticket, and collect extra revenue. If that's by policy or incompetence that's not always clear.
Well, you can be a terrorist however you choose, that's up to you.
But since most ordinary people aren't going to jump through all of those hoops to have every day encryption, that would have the effect of taking encryption away from non-technical people.
So, me, I'm in favor of Google and Apple putting encryption on and having no access to the key to decode it.
Having Apple and Google stop providing encryption is exactly what the spies and fascists want. That way everyone is insecure, and the use of encryption can be equated to being a terrorist. I'd rather see everyone use encryption all the time, and the spies can fuck off an get warrants from judges after showing probable cause ... not just gathering everything and figuring out what to do with it later.
But having everyone expect to be spied on just in case? Yeah, show me your fucker papers, comrade.
That's not "free", that's the opposite of free. That's saying the government needs to be able to spy on everything you do without warrant or probable cause, and you should accept that.
If Americans are starting to think this, then America is pretty much screwed.