Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
It was at the beginning of my career in IT. I was working for a self-employed engineer who had set up a test bench for industrial pumps. I was in charge of creating the UI software (in Visual Basic - sorry) that would allow the users to start or stop the bench, and see what the test status was. Everything was supposed to be automatic.
It was an impressive machine, I must say. The pumps would arrive by overhead rail. Upon reaching the proper position, a pump would be lowered for pressure testing. Tubes would be brought into place and cover the proper points on the pump. Once that was done, water was made available and the pump was set to work to ensure proper functioning. When the test was over, the system would drain, tubes would be removed, and the pump went on its merry way.
My UI was supposed to show all the steps, which I am happy to say that, after testing it for every possible scenario, it did.
Once everything was ready, we went to do the live demo. Everything went fine until a few minutes before we were supposed to finished, when the test bench froze.
I looked at the engineer. He looked at me. We hadn't moved a muscle. What had happened ?
I'll spare you the description of the 90 minutes that followed, what it boils down to is that, somehow, the big red Emergency Stop button had been pressed on the side of the test bench.
When I got back home (late) that evening, I promised myself I was going to integrate the status of that button in my UI the next day.
And that is the great strength of China, which has an interior market that dwarfs that of three continents on its own.
India is the only other country with a comparable population and, therefor, market size.
And the OHSG has pushed China to become technically independant with his hare-brained idiotic schemes.
The dragon has woken, and it is stirring. We will feel its bite sooner rather than later.
The CCP has always been ruining China.
First they did it by murdering anyone capable of critical thinking, removing vast amounts of experienced people in a horribly brutal fashion.
Then they did it with pie-in-the-sky economic rules that starved millions, to the point where they had to actually re-allow personal vegetable fields to avoid emptying the country completely.
What's happening now is a stroll in the park compared to what has already happened.
Hmm, I love the smell of UK Gov IT failure in the morning.
A £300 million budget and nothing to show for it yet ? I can do nothing for that kind of money as well.
And everyone knows it won't become an issue before the spending hits £600 million, but then, with minimal effort shown, it'll hit a billion and that's when the project will really take off.
A Synology DS420+ goes for around €350. Add 4 8TB SSDs at €830 a pop and you're still €1300 better off and you have a product for which bottlenecks will not occur so often.
I understand what a pet project is, but sometimes you need to look at the cold, hard numbers first.
Y2K ? Really ? It seems a bit late to congratulate people for an issue that was solved 21 years ago.
When I started reading that sentence I thought it would end in "helping to address the COVID confinement problem", but no, Y2K it was.
Has India done nothing more important since then that would be a more relevant reference ?
I'm baffled.
Actually this happens all the time. Tender for a government contract ? It may be public, but if you're in that particular market it's pretty easy to spot the few clauses that guarantee that a specific company has already been chosen - no use applying.
This is done openly and everyone is aware of it, so why choose to make the negociations secret ? That's the kind of thing that is going to ensure that a gigantic spotlight is turned on and targetting the affair closely. It is the exact opposite of what is apparently wanted : to ensure that the Tuvalu government gets to quietly pick another provider.
If they had made a public offering with the criteria required to ensure many operators could apply, then they could let the application period pass by quasi-ignored by most and pick the operator of their choice at the end, no questions asked. Of course, the incumbent would whine, but everyone would expect that and the comments would be few. Mission accomplished.
Instead, Tuvalu now has the attention of the Internet world for trying to avoid attention.
Bravo.
Company PCs are the last ones, at this point in time, that are going to dally about with a new Windows release.
It took about 10 years for companies to get away from Vista, and that transition still isn't entirely finished.
Don't look to companies to bolster Borkzilla's new pet project numbers.
Yup.
And, once again, Internet to the rescue :
Disable Windows 11 Upgrade Using DisableOSUpgrade Registry Key
1. Type regedit in RUN or Start search box and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor.
2. Now go to following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows
3. Create a new key under Windows key and set its name as WindowsUpdate. If the key is already present, skip to next step.
4. Now in right-side pane, create a new DWORD DisableOSUpgrade and set its value to 1
I really would like you penguinistas to realize one thing : we don't use Windows because we want to.
If the tools I needed were available on any Linux distro, I would have already changed.
So let's drop that thread, okay ?
We know Linux exists. We'll switch as soon as it is damned possible.
In the meantime, we have to work.
That is because the new generation of developers have never used them, so they don't understand how indispensable hotkeys are.
This new generation does everything on the smartphone. When seated in front of a proper keybord+mouse environment, apparently they are lost and are desperately trying to recreate the smartphone interface.
Unfortunately for us greybeards, we know full well that a good sequence of hotkeys goes ten times faster than the mouse can hope to follow.
Seems like that knowledge is going to go the way of the dinosaurs.
But then I read about how he was only acting on behalf of investors.
Why the hell did you invest in Facebook ?
What it is doing to children and vulnerable people is not new, but you only discovered it when you bought some shares ?
Is that hypocritical, or what ?
The lawsuit should be thrown out.
Neither Teams nor WebEx are all that difficult to handle.
With Teams just use the browser, that avoids the installation hassle and you can use the guest invite, no personal info gathered there.
With WebEx, sure, you have to install, but you do that once, then you can connect to any room someone invites you to.
For both, audio & video are pretty easy to check and they mostly work with your default settings, so there shouldn't be need of much tinkering.
YMMV, but I really don't see a global backlash against tools that we discovered in the urgency of the first confinement. It's working now, so why change it ?
I have recently upgraded my home PC. My new motherboard has an NVMe slot if you care to check the image, it is behind the RAM and underneath the PSU connector). I have an NVMe drive waiting for it.
Except that, there is nothing that holds the card to the slot. There is no retaining device, so the card just slots in and, if ever the case is moved or jostled in any way, the card is liable to pop out.
Very poor design in my opinion. SATA connectors have blocking pins like Ethernet, so where is the blocker on NVMe cards ?
I'm not slotting that card in until someone does something so that it can't just fall out.
Back then, you had to be competent to make a game run. The difficulty getting anything on screen was already a first hurdle and, as said here, once you had your screen you had crumbs left over for the code and data.
Nowadays, they'll just tell you that you need 16GB of RAM to run the game, but hey! there's 7,486,684,325 planets to explore !
And they're all in memory.
"one way this bug might be abused would be if a miscreant obtained a stolen laptop or notebook computer with vulnerable hardware"
If he's got the laptop it's game over, no need to fiddle with the CPU.
He can just take the disk out, slap it into a USB receptacle and read anything he wants. If it's not encrypted, it's his to read.
How is this supposed to be a vulnerability ?
is that the uni spent £30 million to learn that they had to replace everything else before implementing a Student Lifecycle Project, which is just fancy wording for an SQL database of student grades.
Oh well, sometimes lessons are expensive.
I would have said expensive lessons are the best remembered, but somehow I doubt that the uni is going to remember anything from this.
I have a collection of toon ties (from Tie Rack). Tom & Jerry, Sheep, Doc & Wolf, Bugs, Coyote, a bunch of them.
I used to wear them to customer site back when wearing a tie was a common requirement. I got more than a few laughs out of it from customers.
These days, only manglement wears a tie, and sometimes not even them (except at banks - they'll still be wearing ties in a thousand years), so I still dress properly, but no more tie.
I almost regret that, but not quite.
During the XMas week though, I wear my XMas tree tie with Mickey Mouse on it wherever I go.
In an era where alerts abound and computers have never been under so much scrutiny, it is really surprising to see that public ad panels basically have no controlling software that decides whether or not everything is working fine before throwing an image on screen.
You'd think that ad agencies would prefer to ensure that their Windows box was able to function before activating the public panel.
Well, apparently they don't give two hoots about that.
Um, it is a fact that people are a lot more bold when they have a keyboard between them and their actions.
If this Zhukov had had to enact something in real life, I think he would have been somewhat less bold.
So let's not get carried away with the rhetoric, hmm ? He found yet another way to screw people* out of their money. There's no boldness required.
* okay, there were advertisers, but that's one step above lawyers
Okay, first of all, they dreadfully need to improve accuracy. They're barely capable of forecasting tomorrow's weather properly, unless it's clear skies all over Europe in which case they just might get it right for 5 days in a row.
Second : if you have to change your forecast every hour, you're not forecasting anything. You're looking out the window and writing down what you see.
I can do that just as well.
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