Posts by Pascal Monett 10912 posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Does that mean that he'll be hiring back the 1000 people he fired ?
If not, how will he justify firing 1000 people and then hiring 12 times that ?
I know all about creative accounting, but Jesus, this is creative employee management. There are supposed to be laws about that.
Fuck that.
If I paid for a product with a given list of functionality and find out, after the fact, that using said functionality depends on me recording my private data on some effing cloud, I guarantee that there will be some people regretting getting my calls.
So that's NetGear on my blacklist. Good to know.
Not that I'd buy that kind of equipment for myself, but if they can do that on the high-end, then they'll definitely do that on the low-end.
Well duh. The Police these days are just an extension of the NSA - they want all the data they can get whether it is pertinent to the case or not.
And it's very nice to know that Uber sends thousands of user data to the police - how much of that sharing actually brought a condemnation ?
How much of it was actually useful in court ?
That's the other problem I have with all this data sharing going on. Law enforcement all over the world now steadfastly declares that it is very useful to them, but never declares how many cases they won because of it.
There's almost everything and the kitchen sink in that list.
Explainable AI ? Good one.
Citizen app development ? Oh, so they're going to get the users to do part of the job. Smart move.
Low-code dev platforms and augmented analytics tooling & capability. Can't wait to see you demonstrate how to do augmented analytics with low-code tools.
One thing seems clear to me : the guy who wrote all that bull will certainly not be around when the fertilizer hits the rotating dispenser blades.
I was 15 years old and eagerly scouting National Geographics for news on Voyager. It was a wonderful publication at the time. I remember seeing the first ever "close-ups" of Jupiter and Saturn and the pictures just blew my mind.
In one monthly edition there was a poster of our galaxy, our position in it, and it's position in the local cluster. I had that poster on my wall for years and years. Sadly, I lost it when I moved at some point.
I think I should credit National Geographics and Voyager for getting me interested in space.
I'm sorry, but I don't see that there is all that much that is possible for the general public right now. Apart from laser eye surgery, there is nothing high-tech that anyone can have implemented which will improve their eyesight or hearing (there are no hearing aids implanted in the ear), much less their strength.
And as for improving one's strength, how could that possibly work via implant ? What would you implant ? I know of nothing that could even begin to do that. Improving strength is via exoskeletons at this point in time and that's all we've got (and we don't have too much of it either).
There are lab experiments trying to allow control of a mouse via thought, but I haven't heard that they're ready for market yet.
Anyone know of some implantable thingy that actually enhances a human being ? Beyond an RFID chip that allows you to open a door, I mean.
Oh it certainly could be viable - QuakeOnline has been rocking it for years now and it's not your browser doing the graphics.
It boggles the mind to think that we are indeed headed straight back to the 90s. Apparently the future of IT is everyone on a dumb terminal connected to a CPU datacenter. You upgrade by paying a bit more on your monthly plan. I'm guessing they'll want to bill you for amount of CPU activity and electricity you consume, because otherwise how can it be economically viable ?
Well I will leave the younguns the pleasure of finding out how that works. My data and my activity stays local, thank you very much.
I hope the Indian government will hold fast to its requirement.
Apple is the company with the most money in the bank, it can take the hit.
Bit by bit, multinational behemoths will participate in the local economy. They will dragged in kicking and screaming, but it will happen.
Apple really has to learn to not give important jobs to the summer intern. Last time it was with the time zone issue, where Apple became the only company in the world to forget that there is such a thing as a time zone. Now, Apple has forgotten to respect people's settings after a measly reboot.
Not even a system wipe and reinstall, which would be perfectly acceptable and nobody could complain, but just a reboot.
So Apple kit is no longer meant to be turned off. How green.
Well, Apple may not offer any explanation, but I'm betting there will be a patch coming real soon.
Both of your observations are perfectly correct, of course, but even if a person doesn't know what email headers are, they can still tweak to the fact that the email they're reading is supposed to be from Microsoft and was sent from a Gmail account.
You don't need to be a high priest to know that Microsoft has no Gmail account, and anyone in Microsoft sending "official" corporate mail from Gmail would likely see their career ended pretty quickly.
A tiny bit of logic and observation is all that is required to avoid a vast majority of nasties, especially those that are not specifically tailored for you (as in phishing attacks - I would guess those are better conceived). Unfortunately, logic and observation are rare commodities these days.
I cannot imagine building a database of any complexity without coding. If you have a no-code design environment, then you will have to have modules and you will be constrained by what the modules allow. The modules will only allow for what has been coded in them by actual developers and the no-code approach means you can't modify them in any way.
So the only "applications" you can make are the ones that correspond to the modules' abilities. If what you need lies outside that scope, you can't build it.
There may well be some types of application that benefit from this approach, but I can't see people building everything they need simply with a drag-and-drop environment.
Well isn't there a simple solution ? Block all Iran IP addresses on the router, problem solved.
I can understand that media sectors and, eventually, financial sectors could welcome IP traffic from Iran, but please explain how exactly an Iranian citizen in Iran is going to sign up for US healthcare, insurance or use US government facilities ? Don't they all require US residency ?
Maybe there are dual-citizenship US/Iranian people who regularly go to Iran, but they can understand that they need to be in the US to conduct their US business. And a VPN is not all that expensive.
Why is it that key government websites accept traffic from any country other than their own anyway ? I fail to see what benefit a Chinese citizen in China can find in browsing impots.gouv.fr, especially as that site is exclusively in French, and they don't have a login anyway.
Um, sorry, but I have trouble accepting that statement.
It is not because your competition has a strong platform that it is stifling freedom, creation and learning. As for connecting, take your grievances to FaceBook.
I'm not defending Apple in any way shape or form, but my liberty to learn, create and share does not depend on Apple's good will and benevolence. There are other means and platforms to use, and Spotify will not be able to transform this in a meeting at OK Corral. If Spotify dies, Apple will not take over the world.
I understand that lawyers have to build a case, but saying that Apple is the guardian of freedom and creation is going a bit too far.
And, as far as learning is concerned, there's Curiosity Stream, Brilliant, TED talks, SciShow, Geographics and hundreds more.
Sorry, Spotify, you're on shifting sands if you go down that route.
Okay, where acid flowed biosignatures are destroyed in the clay, understood.
But Perseverance is not landing in a acid-washed clay basin, so everything is good then ? If there are signs of life to be found, Perseverance might find them.
Do I need to use this as another reason to panic ? Because I have enough of those at this point in time.
So, now that I am reassured that I'm far from the only one having had to deal with this specific bunch of vipers, could someone please explain to me why is it that we are in the 3rd millennium, using object-oriented 4G or even 5G languages, and we are still writing dates as strings ?
Why is it that there is no language today (caveat : that I know of) that treats a date as an object with three parameters and the format it is shown in depends on the OS ?
Is it really that hard ?
(Yes, of course it is, because legacy - but dammit, couldn't we at least get a choice ?)
As a programmer working with international companies, I have had no end of grief getting data to integrate only to find that, not only there are dates in the US format, but not all dates are in the same format because the file has contributions from a group of people.
That is a can of worms I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
And that counts for what ? Is there a legal requirement to have to sign up in the program before testing for vulnerabilities ?
No there is not. And, like it or not, your product will come under the attention of state actors that have much more experience under their belt.
You are not running a controlled ship. You have a product out there, and it will be under attack.
You are supposed to welcome investigation by people who are trying to help, because smothering them is only going to leave the door wide open to people who have no intention of telling you what you missed.
I ran across that particular tidbit as well, and I tried it. It doesn't actually work, but there's a caveat : if someone with access to the design locked the database, then updated the design without locking it again, then flipping that bit would indeed give you access to the unlocked overwrite.
But if the database was managed properly, then there is no unlocked code to read and the manipulation is useless.
You see, when you lock a Lotus Notes database, you compile the code and get rid of the source. When you work in an unlocked database, you have the source with the compiled code.
No, the template is not a text file, it is a database. The design was locked, meaning that it was no longer readable, so it was not possible to copy it into anything.
And yes, I am still working with that customer. The IT director trusts me and there really isn't any other consultant with 25 of years experience in that particular field that they can call on.
If the customer was so sure it should have worked, the customer could have done the himself.
There are times when you should say "no" to a contract, and when a customer is clearly cutting corners and not doing things properly is one of those times because, contract clauses be damned, it will always be your fault if something goes wrong.
And something always does.
Oh my, that brings back memories. I was working as a consultant in a major insurance company, on an on-call basis.
One day, I get called to go modify something in the mail template that defines what every mailbox is supposed to look like and what features it is supposed to have. So I pack my laptop and off I go. When I'm settled at my desk and after the meeting with the IT manager, with all the technical details I need in mind, I log into my local account and ask the system to start up the Designer on the mail template.
The Designer was a no show.
Not that the Designer had a problem, it was the template that was not accessible. It's design had been locked.
After a brief but intense moment of WTF! and deep soul-searching, I reassured myself that I would never have been stupid enough to lock the design of the most important template the customer had, so I went back to the IT manager and reported the problem. His matter-of-fact reply was simple : get the backup copy.
Like every responsible IT shop in any major company, backups were made incremental every day, full every week-end and end-of-month. So finding a good backup should be simple, right ?
Well, in a word, no. I basically spent a day with the systems team, going back every further in time to try and find a copy that hadn't been locked. When we had gone over the two months of backup that were stored locally, my new friend turned to me and said "Okay, this is all I've got here. Do you want me to go to the archives and fish out the storage tapes of the previous months ?". I could clearly see that that was not a prospect that he particularly relished, and I had already spent too much time on this issue, so I declined with thanks and left him relieved to be able to finally take care of his normal duties.
But I still had a problem : I had a template to rebuild. Or find a copy of, somewhere.
I will spare you the details, but let me just say that I finally did find a valid copy of the template on a server which, ironically, it never should have been put. I was able to make the requested changes, copy the unlocked template to production servers, and keep a local copy in my local profile - just in case someone else got the same stupid idea.
And that's how a 30-minute job was invoiced 10 hours and paid in full without any discussion.
Nobody ever told me who had locked the design.
IBM already bowed out of facial recog in June (see linked article) when it said so in a letter to several senators.
What IBM is doing now is simply doubling down on the act and going for the full package : no facial recog anywhere, until proper laws have been put in place ensuring the respect of privacy and proper identification of miscreants.
I think IBM is right on one point : technology has, in this case, clearly exceeded what the law can handle and the law needs to be updated.
That said, I agree that the fact that IBM is calling for a ban is simply because IBM's facial recog was never any good, so IBM is likely trying to peg the market to give it time to catch up.
Because IBM stated that it was no longer offering general facial recog solutions, it never said it wasn't working on them.
"The interception of these counterfeit earbuds is a direct reflection of the vigilance and commitment to mission success by our CBP Officers daily. "
Nope. It's a direct reflection of how little you're paying attention to what you're actually looking at. As for mission success, it is hardly a success to block something that has nothing to do with what you're looking for. That's called a false positive, and you should correct that.
Except that, this is the Trump era, and we all know that you're just doing your bit to bother China in any way you can, even if it is wrong.
And I don't see that changing any time soon.
As I've already said, that Microsoft adds yet another thingy on it's already bursting patchwork of a software quilt is no surprise, but Oracle is only Oracle and only does Oracle.
I am glad to see that the author of the article is in the same frame of mind.
Oracle and TikTok go together like tank tops and suede shoes. It doesn't match.
Sorry, but there's your problem.
No project should be started without knowing where you want to end up. I don't care if you use Agile or Waterfall, you still have to know what the required functionality is and a company that cannot state its needs deserves to fail.
This is obviously a bunch of high-level "managers" who have never been confronted with the daily grind and think that IT is a magical process that just happens.
Well no, it doesn't "just happen". It needs thought, planning and employee adoption, and you obviously got none of those.
. . for it's customers to continue to put op with Ellison's bullshit manipulations of policy, licenses and contracts to milk every last possible cent out of them.
Customers are "picking Oracle Cloud Infrastructure" because they bloddy well don't have the choice, it was forced upon them in the last license modification and, if they choose to defy the Great Red One, they pay even more than the eye-watering costs they already incur.
I'm not CEO of a large company in any way, but I can guarantee that, if that ever happens, I will make sure that Oracle never sets foot into my server rooms.
It's nice to see a cyber security bureau on the ball and giving out the right advice.
Such a shame about Australia's stance on backdoored encryption.
Maybe this cyber security bureau could have a word with the government ?
Mine's the one with proper encryption in the pocket.
Yes, but others were going up against a market where two multi-billion dollar behemoths were already entrenched and battle-ready. In China, there are over a billion potential customers and most of them have never heard of either Apple or Google. And the Chinese government has form in swinging the ban hammer if a local company feels it's getting in trouble.
That should help things along quite a bit. A mobile phone solution could garner half a billion customers easily before trying its toes in the international arena. If it doesn't work swimmingly, it would still have its local market to fall back on, something Symbian and Windows Mobile never had.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2020