The problem with buying a $2000 iPhone as a status symbol is that no one knows whether you bought the $1100 256GB model or the $2000 1TB model unless you tell them.
But someone that cares about watches knows whether you paid $5000 or $50000 for your Rolex just by looking.
The problem is that Google only covers "most of it", so even if it covers 99% of use cases, for that cases where it doesn't, companies still need MS Office.
I worked for a startup that was all OSX desktops and Google Docs. Then when we hit 100 employees, the finance department required MS Office, so they used Office for Mac, then as we grew, they needed real MS Office running in Windows, so they ran Windows in Parallels, then as we continued to grow they moved to full Windows laptops. When I left the company (at around 1000 employees), almost a third of the company was on Windows (mostly in Finance, Sales, and other business departments). And the team supporting the 2/3 Mac desktops was about 1/3 the size of the team supporting Windows.
Though I suppose it's easier for a government to move off Microsoft. When an investor tells you to use their financial modeling software that only works with MS Excel, it's pretty hard for a small company to refuse, but a government has more power to force others to conform to their choice.
Their initial need for Office was some soft of forecasting model that they needed to update for a large investor. That was a big spreadsheet that ran on Office for OSX if I remember correctly. After that, I don't know what specifically they needed to use, they had purchased some software that required Windows and Office.
Call me cynical, but having been around the block a few times when I hear "need" and "require" my brain translates that to "want" and "it would be convenient if". I've done my share of forecasting for investors and am quite confident that there is nothing in any startup forecast that could conceivably "require" Windows. I mean, absolute worst case, just use SQL.
The CFO just preferred Windows, that's it, I'd bet money on it.
The requirement came from the investment house - they wanted data in the format they were accustomed to.
What was driving that requirement at the investment house doesn't matter, when the company that owns over 50% of your company wants something, you don't say "Hey, we don't want to buy a Windows license with your money, how about I send it to you in this similar, but different format and then you guys can figure out how to make it match what you're looking for?"
IME what it means is that they have a bunch of processes built that specifically depend on it. It doesn't make it impossible to switch but depending on the scope could be financially or practically prohibitive to migrate. Maybe someone has 10 years of custom excel macros put together that are run every quarter, that would need to be migrated. To migrate you might not have the internal capacity and might need to hire external help to do it.
Not anymore. Today I tried to copy paste a string of 15 ascii characters into an Excel cell. Excel spun around for 20 seconds then blurted out an error that "the data is too big". I hit F2 (enter cell Edit Mode), pasted the 15 characters in the edit window and this was I was able to get the data in the cell.
>For baby 10M+1 are they going to tell a Swiss woman that she can’t have a baby?
This wouldn't happen because it's not actually a population control measure, it's an immigration control measure - when the population gets above 9.5M, Switzerland would start shutting down immigration/asylum. There's nothing in the initiative that would set controls on births by Swiss citizens. (and it would be unlikely to be needed since Switzerland is facing the same low birth rate of other western countries)
Having an Alexa or Google Home doesn't seem any worse (or even less worse) than carrying a phone around everywhere I go. If you're worried that the device can be hacked to listen to you full-time (or that the provider is lying about it only listening to you after it hears the wake word), you should be worried about your phone for the same reason. Plus my Alexa isn't going to give google a map of everywhere I travel so they can see where I work, eat, shop, etc.
Yes. I catch myself all the time when I wonder how people are so willing to place these spy devices inside their home. But, "oh yeah, I have a phone on my nightstand every night :-/".
This should be a wakeup call for users of all cloud connected cameras that once they send their video to the cloud provider, they have no real control over how it's used.
Ring does support end to end encryption (which disables most of the cloud features), but users are still at the mercy of Ring to trust that it really is e2e encrypted and not the "fake" end to end encryption that some marketers have used to mean "Well it's encrypted from your end all the way to our end where we decrypt it". I don't trust that Ring doesn't have a law enforcement toggle to break the e2e encryption on demand if the police ask for it.
Not ALL cloud connected cameras. Be careful saying things like that, there are large differences in the trust levels between them. For instance, if you're using homekit, I believe Apple doesn't even have the keys to the e2ee encryption, regardless of your "icloud advanced security" mode.
I stand by what I said -- If you don't control the software stack, you have no control over whether or not your footage is available to the cloud provider (or law enforcement) no matter what the provider says. As I said in my post, you really don't know if they have a secret software toggle that disables e2e encryption for law enforcement demands.
Since writing this comment, I learned that the homekit secure video feature is e2ee by default regardless of that feature. You can't even turn it off. Apple doesn't have the keys.
Don't they already have some sci-fi laser/EW gizmos to take care of those
Isn't that the problem? Someone (but apparently DHS, not the military though there were military staff present, maybe?) had one of those sci-fi laser gizmos and used it without authorization or proper notifications.
I don't think we'll ever learn the real details about exactly what happened, the audit trail (if there was one) is probably in shredder baskets by now
It always amazes me how people can read a blog post like this one that has a clear description of the problem with a log excerpts demonstrating the problem, and then people will confidently make up a completely different scenario that was not mentioned at all and blame the problem on that.
WTF you talking about? Rene, this is defamation and I'm probably going to take action because honestly, enough is enough. I'm fed up of folk like you who lack basic technical knowledge or any knowledge making up bullshit. Your hourly rate makes me like you have money to take.
It amazes me people read that in this community and don't know for an email to bounce it means it didn't find an inbox. If it didn't find an inbox how did he check the logs?
TFA shows an excerpt from the email log for his google workspace account, showing the bounce of email sent from viva.com.
Then, TFA states that he switched "the account" (his viva.com account) from using his GWorkspace address to a personal @gmail.com address, and asked viva to send another verification email. That one arrived.
At no point does TFA describe the author themselves sending a test email.
That doesn't seem like a good argument for instituting a quarantine by blocking air travel but not ground travel. And why block everything including police, cargo and medivac flights for a quarantine?
Then there's no real infection risk if they'll continue to let people drive out of the area, including let people drive a 4 or 5 hours to another airport to make their trip.
Closing the El Paso airspace will reduce the number of people flying, but not stop it, lots of people will make the drive to Tucson or Albuquerque to catch a flight.
I could maybe see it if it was, say, LAX which is a major travel hub, but shutting down a small regional airport without also shutting down ground travel is "quarantine theater" rather than a real quarantine.
If it's just routine testing, then why couldn't they have announced it earlier to allow companies to plan and/or fly their planes out of the affected area?
The problem with this is that you don't know what future conflicts will be. You spend years training yourself to use your own "jq" alias and then you find yourself needing to use the "jq" program and you have to remember to prefix it with backslash every time you use it (including when you copy-and-paste a command line from a webpage), or rename your own alias and re-train yourself to use its new name.
But someone that cares about watches knows whether you paid $5000 or $50000 for your Rolex just by looking.
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