No; a weak password did not kill this company.
Management not investing in the most basic of backup systems is what killed the company.
Companies get their systems wiped out everyday nowadays by ransomeware hackers. Then, they pull the plug on the internet, scrub the computers, and restore from a recent backup. That is management.
This is stupidity.
It matters if it is misrepresented. People are free to listen to what they want but they should know whether they are getting AI stuff or real stuff, especially considering the "band" in question faked the fact that they were real. That would be considered fraud normally.
Back in the mid 80's there was a show called "Knight Rider". You may know of it, from the iconic TransAm it used as the hero car. Guessing by the size of your user id, you should know it well.
Anyway, the music. The show didn't have the budget to license contemporary music, but they did have the budget to hire a sound-alike band to mimic the songs and skirt copyright and licensing restrictions (especially overseas restrictions). Sometimes, it was obvious it was a cover band. Other times, you had to listen really carefully to hear the differences. All this is documented in the book "The Knight Rider Companion", if you care to see my source.
To the point: The Knight Rider audience didn't much care who played and sung the songs; we wanted to see spectacular stunts and Michael Knight win the day. Was the music misrepresented? Maybe; can't remember that much. Was it fraud? By your definition, yes it was.
Curious about your thoughts on this.
It was a Tuesday.
Unlikely.
Far more likely, it was a Friday, and some poor sod of a programmer had been ordered to push code to PROD. The code, of course, was barely tested, and had a number of nasty bugs that were only apparent in the PROD environment because management was too cheap to properly build out a UAT environment for testing. Anyway, they push to PROD, reboot the system and BOOM! What looks like two black holes merging was actually a division by zero in a critical system.
That's my theory, anyway.
Sometimes, stuff is just hard to get right. Look at AirPower: announced in 2017; cancelled in 2019 because they just couldn't;t make it work right.
I'd personally rather Apple take their time and get AI done right, than jam it into every single product, irrespective of if it makes sense or not. A Copilot-powered Notepad, for example, is just silly; yet here we are. The case management built into Dynamics CRM has Copilot summaries now; they are less than useful and make page loading take so much longer.
I bought an iPhone 16 on the basis of the AI capabilities; it was our designated upgrade year anyway so the fact these features haven't materialized is no great loo; in fact I'm happy not to have them when I look at the ungodly mess Microsoft land has become. And Google's AI summaries... there is wrong, and there is not even close to being wrong.
So enjoy AI dogshit everywhere, even in apps where it makes no sense.
Ah, another satisfied Microsoft 365 user, describing their wondrous interactions with Copilot!
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Did we split timelines, again!?
Nope; just pre-empting tomorrow's internet carnage. Today's mess is something else.
(Also "IBM refused" to make a "low power" design is rather different from what actually happened, IBM had difficultly fulfilling their original promise to make a 3GHz part and Jobs threw a wobbly about it. Nothing about refusal or low power in there. I'm sure it'd have been easier for IBM to make a lower speed, low power, mobile part if that's what Jobs had been hyper-focused on. The 32 bit CPUs in the last generation of PPC Powerbooks weren't exactly rockets, with 1.67 GHz being the fastest 32-bit G4 released in a PowerBook. A 2GHz G5, or even a 1.5GHz G5, would have been a substantial step up.)
The book "Infinite Loop" had a take on this, too. The whole Power line had issues, and increasing clock speeds would be problematic for it. Andy Grove paid Apple a visit, and showed them their roadmap. Apple took them seriously (for a change), seeing that Intel's CPUs would leave the Power chips in the dust, both in pure GHz performance and power consumption. It was a no-brainer for then to switch to Intel, whilst leaning how to design their own chips, with the A4 being released in 2010.
Remember, the whole PowerPC thing was an Apple - IBM - Motorola alliance to counter Intel. Apple was interested in their own chips even then. The alliance fell apart because Motorola couldn't hold it's end of the bargain up; specifically making faster CPUs.
Hopefully, the first title available will be Half Life 3.
"Sergant, we need to storm Bastion UTF-8. What do have in the way of troops?"
"Well, it can't be a cohort from UTF-16 - they will get cut down to size!"
In only a thousand years everything will be gone!
I've got to prepare!
Damn. So I still have to pay my AmEx bill on Friday.
Wow, double irony. I had a Unicode superscript 3 on that, which was removed by Slashdot.
Ah, Slashdot! Last bastion for UTF-8 on the internet!
It may well be immune to heat, cold, and, uh, salt, but the company's website says that the substrate is glass, and obviously there are lots of things that glass is not immune to. For one, we must hope that no bulls get loose in the library over the next 5000 years.
DVDs were expected to last 100 years; however some of my collection is less than 20 years old and is unreadable. I'm taking that 5000 years with a very large grain of salt.
... preparing for a cataclysmic event like pole reversal
The last pole reversal was 41,000 years ago. We obviously survived. They are more slow-motion events than any thing else.
Not sure who/what broke EA but the path from something like Beasts & Bumpkins to full on EVUL CORP must have been a depressing one.
I was there, at the dawn of the Third Age of Computing. It began in the Earth year 1985 with the founding of Deluxe Paint. EA was good back then; they contributed so much to the burgeoning Amiga: Deluxe Paint, Instant Music, Deluxe Music Construction Set, and Deluxe Video. They were a founding partner of the IFF (Interchange File Format) standard that dominated the Amiga scene.
And then they changed.
The EA today is unrecognizable to the EA of years ago; instead of a company on the cutting edge of consumer software, they sit behind a mountain of increasingly worse sequels. We saw this coming in 1995 with the release of Deluxe Paint 5, a release that really served no purpose other than to extract money from a dwindling population. I think we can pinpoint the change: Deluxe Paint 3, which added animation and was still led by Dan Silva, was released in 1989; whereas Deluxe Paint 4 was released in 1991 without Dan leading it.
The more I think of it, the 1989 - 1991 timeframe is when EA revealed their true selves.
After so much effort and hoo-ha, Recall is finally released.
Even then, it has two problems:
1. Who asked for this feature?
2. What problem does it actually solve?
In the year+ since this feature was announced, I've never heard a single compelling reason for this to exist. In the meantime, this story, Employee Monitoring App Leaks 21 Million Screenshots In Real Time came along to remind us why this feature is really a bad idea.
Too much of everything is just enough. -- Bob Wier
