Posts by Pascal Monett 19253 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Not to mention that their keyboard isn't even a full keyboard.
What ? You want me to pay $1500 for a portable computer keyboard and you can't be arsed to offer a full numpad and a proper set of arrow and orientation keys ?
You want me to believe you didn't have enough space ?
And, on top of that, I'd have to also lug around a screen.
A niche product ? Oh yes. It's specially destined for idiots with more money than sense.
18 months for having forced x number of agents move in urgency to resolve a serious matter with lethal force if required, imposed such force upon unsuspecting, innocent people who did nothing wrong and could very well have been killed in the operation and all the costs associated ?
No. He deserves much more than that. At minimum, he deserves to pay for the costs he incurred.
Either that or he should be SWATted himself and see how it feels.
Quite (ahem).
It's very much like when you ask someone what browser they're using and they answer "Google".
I have spent twenty of our 36-year marriage educating my wife as to the difference. The Internet is the highway. Your browser is the car. Google is just a roadmap.
You don't sit on your roadmap to get to your destination, now do you ? If only we could.
That said, my dear better half has actually clicked to this message and, when she has yet another problem on one of the many shopping sites she is regularly on (hey, she's retired - gotta do something with all that time, right ?) and I ask her what browser she is using, she now correctly responds Chrome, or Brave, or Firefox as is the case. Then we get on with troubleshooting whatever the flavor of the problème du jour is which, more often than not, happens to be due to some stupid modification in the website that has nothing to do with the Internet or her laptop, but hey, I'm the (literally) resident IT guy, so . . .
In his place, I would have made quite a show of it.
Point to the network cable coiled up on that wall.
Go over and stand next to it, like a hostess on The Price Is Right, and pose next to it while displaying it with both hands.
Taking it off the wall and plugging it in.
Standing next to the now-connected computer and, once again, showing it with both hands.
One can only dream . . .
Of course it's value for money, but for who ?
By the way (of, for you younglings, BTW), is anyone else seriously annoyed by this unexpected change in El Reg home page presentation ?
What on Earth was wrong with the last one, the one that actually presented new articles before old ones ?
Are we going to get a <beurk> Dark Mode as well ?
No hyperbole, no sensational remarks, no snark.
Just the cold, hard truth. One that, increasingly, it appears that all people in position of power intend to ignore.
Well you can ignore the truth for a while, but it will come back and bite you in the ass. And the higher up you are, the harder the bite will be.
The pigeons are coming home to roost, Redmond, and it ain't gonna be pretty.
And you deserve all the shit you're going to get.
No.
What is needed is stronger parental education and guidance, and it just so happens that actual parenting is apparently happening.
Because that is NOT what the government wants. It wants nice obedient sheeple to which it can point and say "Look ! Squirrel !" and, while the sheeple are distracted, the "masterminds" are filling their pockets and living the high life.
Borkzilla doesn't care that you are actually working.
Those equipment obsolescence excuses are all very nice and, to be true, cannot be attacked. They are an iron-clad reason to go and shit on your day's work.
But that does not mean that Borkzilla shouldn't be trying to extend the usage of those VM flavors for the companies who prefer using old kit instead of, once again, spending the next two years uprooting their existing (working) environment to force-march towards a shiny new future where they can re-invent the wheel (again) and try to continue to actually run a fucking business.
What Borkzilla should have done is simply alert all existing users that there is a new platform they can migrate to while keeping their existing environment and that they should do it because the existing platform is getting old and becoming obsolete.
The difference in that approach is that Redmond did the work to ensure that its existing customers could keep on working and that the choice is up to the customer.
After all, the customer is always right, eh ?
Yeah, not in The CloudTM he ain't. In The CloudTM, you take what you're given, you pay top dollar for it and you kiss the feet that take your money.
Once upon a time I was called in to take over security for a new customer.
My company was selected and I was the frontend to replace a very well-known company in Luxembourg which I will not name for obvious reasons.
The time for handover came and the previous responsible gave me a USB key with an Excel file that had the passwords that I needed.
Sorted in a table by the company name.
With all the other companies' data just a click away.
What kind of fuckwit doesn't realize that you don't just give away confidential data like that ?
It's beyond me.
This current rash of malware has one good consequence : those companies destroyed by it are going to remember that they should have paid more attention to IT and security in general.
Yes, it's going to hurt. People are going to lose their jobs. It's unfortunate.
It's also the cost of waking up to the world as it is : a dangerous place where you need to ut up firewalls and barriers if you want to last.
So, all this AI shit is finally going to start costing real money. And the companies pushing it will find out the hard way that their "wonderful" product is going to be dropped like a hot potato. And all those ginormous data centers are going to run at a loss and maybe we'll see less of them being built.
So, cheers all around, eh ?
Except for the CEOs who thought they had invented Web 4.0.
Not a great loss.
So, in other words, locking the PC was an essential protection against . . your own colleagues.
I had that happen to me once. I was finished eating a banana and went to the other side of the office to throw it into the bin. When I turned around, the dipshit sitting next to me was busy typing away on my keyboard.
I will spare you the verbal abuse that spewed at that point but, suffice to say, he never that shit again when I was discarding my banana peel.
Security is one thing. Bullshitting is entirely different.
Indeed, as Cisco demonstrates regularly.
And, as far as National Security is concerned, I fail to see where consumers are implicated. This notion concerns government administrations and the military, not consumers.
If you push it, you could eventually mandate that critical infrastructure not be connected to the Internet but only accessible via dedicated phone lines. THAT would be useful.
But of course, being actually useful is not what this administration is worried about.
I disagree.
He's a good deal richer now that he has turned his tenure in the White House into a money-making scheme which, in my view, should be excuse enough to shoot him in the head without trial.
He is a discrace to the country he is supposed to represent, a disgrace to the very notion of Democracy, and simply a discraceful human being (if you can call that orange thing human).
Who is competent to decide that the safeguards were "stronger" ?
The idiots who created the monstrosity in the first place, or the external "AI specialist" who was called in to handle the situation ?
Can we finally get to the point where any pseudo-AI company is finally called on its ability to deliver reliable results ?
I once had a very interesting conversation with a French syndicalist working at Cattenom (ie. the nuclear power station barely 20km from my house).
He told me this :
"The power grid requires stability. EDF (the only realFrench power company) knows the grid requirements very well, they have statistics and analysis going back for decades. Nuclear is there to provide for a steady, 80% of grid requirements. When a certain threshold is reached, coal enters into the scene. Coal serves because, although it takes time to fire up, it has inertia and that inertia is well known and taken into account. Finally, gas-powered plants are fired up in case of spikes that need to be taken care of but don't last long."
He also mentioned that solar and especially wind are murder on the grid because they induce unforeseeable variations that have to be compensated for in other ways.
Sorry for your health problems, but Trump thinks you're dead and mail-in voting is a cancer.
Except when he uses it, of course.
Let's completely ignore that the prices of everything computing have already been shot sky-high before everyone learned, the hard way, what the Gulf of Hormuz was and why it mattered.
Now you're telling me that IT spending is going to skyrocket when a major transport route is being chocked to hell ?
Do you know where all that wonderful IT equipment comes from ?
Hint : it's not Made in USA.
