Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Methinks there may bit a wee bit more, especially since I noticed, the last time I logged into my Gmail account, I was logged in to Hangouts.
It would appear that Google, in its vast goodness, has decided that, once you log into Hangouts, you can no longer log out.
I guess the top brass were tired of seeing shrinking usage, so they told the trolls in the basement to do something about that.
Luxembourg.
In a high-level meeting to define the specs of an application that was supposed to revolutionize the internal document management system of the company, I was busy explaining how the access rights worked to the database and its documents when one of the bigwigs interrupted me, asking about the access to the documents.
I re-explained how the user creating the document was responsible for the document (at application level) and could delegate reponsibility to other people. After ten minutes of additional explanations my colleague took over and, being Luxembourghish, gave an explanation in that language. I still didn't understand what the problem was.
After the meeting, it struck me : the bigwigs didn't want to have to touch the computer, but they wanted all their documents to be under their name whilst the secretaries did all the work.
I never did get to know what happened to that project, but I didn't have anything to do with it after that meeting. I still believe I got lucky on that.
Brings me back to the first days when I tried out Linux on my machine. Poking through various MAN pages, very alert to warnings about how trying the wrong settings could fry either my graphics card, my VGA screen, or both.
I still managed to find settings that worked. Then I discovered the wonder of having seven different environments available at the touch of an F key.
Heady days.
How hard would it be for the passenger to have a "I have a disability" check in his profile so that UBER already knows not to apply the wait fee ?
But that would go contrary to the Uber Way : charge everything you can possibly think of, refund maybe but only if the user complains.
EDIT : hadn't gotten to the bottom of the replies before posting mine.
Nice to know. At least that way they'll only be wasting time, not millions of dollars ferrying Presidents around along with all the retainers, press, cars and everything else, along with the fuel it would cost.
Hey, maybe COVID will have a positive impact at the political level after all ?
Because drivers these days need more distractions at the wheel.
Brilliant.
And don't tell me it'll be just for the rear passengers : what is the poor front passenger to do ? Stay bored ?
Until we get true autonomous vehicles where everyone can watch a film, this tech should definitely be reserved for rear-seat passengers (but it won't).
Oh, and does this mean future 5G car drivers are going to have ads for films on their maps ? Like, just before where you need to turn bam! up comes an ad for Gladiator 5 and now you've missed your exit ?
So it's basically their way or the highway.
For small businesses who are starting to grow, such limitations can be quite acceptable, but once the business has grown into generating millions per month, I think that Freshworks is going to find that its abilities are no longer enough and the larger clients will migrate to something more customizable.
Which shouldn't really be a problem for Freshworks, since there's always more little businesses to service.
"The investment in the programme has already delivered new systems that previously did not exist at the University"
So let me get this straight : you're in the middle of a rather difficult and complex upgrade on some major components of your system, and you go and add a bunch of new components along the way.
That is undoubtedly a wonderful way to keep the system stable and have reliable comparison points for the upgrade to proceed correctly.
I don't know who is in charge of this "world class" project, but I wouldn' trust them with upgrading my standalone PC.
Dear me, the sheer number of man-hours that are being tallied for useless dredge like this must be mind-boggling.
And it's not holographic. You're looking at a screen. We've been pretending 3D for decades now, that's all it is.
Holographic is like in Star Wars : you're at your seat and the holograph of some other person appears in another seat, but you are not wearing a headset, you're looking at it with your own eyes.
That kind of conference room ain't for tomorrow.
Well, given that the alternative is a mandatory tour of China's prison system, yeah, I think I'd react like that as well.
A word of warning to CEOs of big-name multinationals : never go to China in person. Up to now, Beijing doesn't have a record for jailing foreign CEOs, but you don't want to be the person starting that record.
Just about as difficult as humor.
Given that we don't have AI, you can statiscally analyze all you want, a CPU is not going to "understand" what is being said.
I agree that grammar correctors have come a long way and that's a good thing, but the computer is not understanding anything, it is just reacting to a set of rules.
Humor ? That is as far away from CPU comprehension as FTL travel is for us meatbags.
Because nobody can accurately calculate humor.
I think you're reaching there. I can positively assert that I have never had a retinal scan, so "they", whoever you may think "they" are, certainly do not have that on me.
As for my fingerprints, I seriously doubt they have that anywhere either, because they've never been to my house (I do think I'd notice someone trying to lift prints off of my furniture) and my prints on a shop door won't last unsmudged more than a few minutes at best, not to mention how curious it would look to have someone dusting for prints on a shop door without any cops in the vicinity.
So let's dial down the conspiracy theories, okay ? The NSA does not employ a legion of 007s.
It's bad enough that the NSA can listen to practically any conversation in the world, no need to add biometric data.
I was going to reflexively reply saying : the NSA, but then I gave it a pause and thought it over.
Now I'm not so sure any more.
Google has oodles of data, lots more hardware and tailored software than the NSA, but it is only looking for ad targetting data.
The NSA hasn't nearly Google's budget (thank $deity for that), but the NSA has backdoors (legal or not) into almost all communications providers and is looking for a lot more than a chance to sling an ad at you.
The real point, I think, is the fact that E2EE is going to put a big crimp on the NSA's data gathering, while I'm not so sure Google is going to feel such an impact.
So, in the end, I guess its a victory for Google.
Wrong argument.
Nobody says any such thing about a car they've never been in.
VR has two things that you do not need to have tried to know about : it has a bulky headset and it requires a lot of power. There's also the fact that the visuals are a far cry from what I can see on my PC screen (from published screengrabs on the Web).
Here's a list of other things I know about and have no intention of trying :
giving a blowjob
getting sodomized
being thrown in jail
I don't need to TRY them before having an opinion on these things. I know enough about them already.
Also, I note that you are not contradicting anything I said.
It's not an opportunity yet.
It's based on VR goggles, and there is no model today that can allow you to wear it for hours without any sort of discomfort. Not to mention that it can make some people physically sick.
In order for this "metaverse" to actually take off and interest people, the industry is going to have to tackle the primary issue : the goggles are heavy and not comfortable to wear for long periods of time. I wouldn't be surprised if VR goggles put a strain on the eyes, but never having tried any personally, I can't vouch for that.
VR goggles are going to have to become much lighter, which is going to be impossible to do if rendering is done in the goggles. If rendering is to be done at a central server, then the goggles might become lighter by an appreciable amount, but there will be lag issues that can be more or less annoying.
Add to that the fact that there will be no privacy around this : if you are to be known for work, it's under your name and, once your equipment has been tagged to your identity, that will probably not go away even you invent another avatar.
I've never been interested in VR, so I would take a pass on this even if The Zuck was not involved.
Oh yes it does. It'll completely forget all the all-nighters you've done and all the times you stayed after hours for no additional pay in order to make sure that everything would go well the next day for that very important presentation.
That is all water under the bridge, especially when review time comes.
But it will remember that one time you didn't manage to make the CEOs new bloody phone sychronize automatically with his company-based mail because you needed a bridge component the company didn't have.
That he will always remember.
Ensuring that the Kessler Syndrome will indeed bring us back to the 1940s.
Until recently, to put a satellite into space you needed to be part of the space industry, work with NASA, generally be reliable.
Ever since everyone and his dog have started making rockets, everyone and his dog are now chucking things up in orbit and I don't feel like they know what the hell they're doing.
Oh for sure, they know they want to make money and space seems as good a place as any. No cables or backhoes to worry about (not to mention no pesky local laws to obey).
But there are other things to worry about and I think there are too many companies vying for opportunity for all of them to have competent personnel who know what they're doing.
Indeed, smart companies do. That rules out IBM.
The problem, as always, is management. When the company starts out, they have the world to conquer. It's thrilling to progress upwards, to build a solid team and see competence and experience flourish while making oodles of money.
Two decades later, the management team has changed. The people who built the company are gone, the employees who still like it there are now only "assets". The new management knows all about managing assets : they compute cost and returns on their little spreadsheet line by line. That ensures that they don't have the foggiest idea why Martin is costing so much per month and yet brings in next to nothing.
That's because they don't know that Martin is the living, breathing encyclopeadia on Product X, and spends most of his working day answering pointed questions from his colleagues on the finer points of debugging this or that problem.
So management decides to get rid of Martin, and the whole house of cards starts its trek towards ending up on the floor.
Does that also have bloody certificates for the simplest tools of the OS ?
Can Borkzilla also shut down part of my work laptop out of sheer incompetence ? (okay, don't answer that)
I can understand certificates on drivers, they usually work in kernel space (even if that seems stupid to me), but on the Snipping tool ? Really ?
And the clock in the task bar, does it have a certificate too ?
What a bloody mess.
Jellyfish have tendrils. Some species are poisonous, all are painful.
Vines use tendrils to latch on to another plant and climb toward the Sun, sometimes choking the supporting plant in the process.
Tendril is also used to describe the increase of the nefarious influence of crime organizations or evil intelligence agencies in litterature (and news, sometimes).
I'm trying, but I can't think of a positive use for the word. I wonder how the marketing team justified that reference.
Um, you've already handed out tens of millions of wallets. I would have preferred you worked on that before letting people sign up.
There's enough hacking history around funny money and it's all available on the Web. You should have done your homework first.
After all, it's not like there isn't a national currency available. There was no rush to put E-CNY in place.
My bank in Luxembourg does not do 2FA. I have an OTP token, so sim-swapping will not give him that either.
As for a shadow FB account, well how can I know ? It's obviously possible with the devious piece of crap call The Zuck.
Does that mean I can sue him if it ever happens ?
I was pretty sure I was immune to that, since my mobe is Luxembourg-based and Luxembourg is a stickler for administrative procedure. Someone calls to say their phone is lost ? No problem sir, what is the number ? There, the phone is blocked. You can now go buy a new one. Sorry ? Transfer to a new sim ? Sorry sir, your phone is lost, go buy a new one. You have another one ? Good for you, have a nice day.
At least, that is how I imagined things, right up until this article made me do a bit of googling and I found this article from no less than Europol.
So it would appear that it could eventually happen to me after all.
Except that, when I check out the particulars, first the miscreant has to get my private information. I'm fairly sure that not being on any social media is going to vastly reduce my possible exposure to unsecured cloud repositories or other such data breach shenanigans. Malicious apps simply do not get to my PC (thank you NoScript) and I don't surf with my mobe. As for the sites where I have activated 2FA, I can count them on the fingers of one hand - none of them are well-known to the hackers and they have no idea I'm subscribed there.
So let's imagine, for the sake of it, that a data breach has occured and, for some strange reason, some of my personal details are contained within. My phone number should not be in there but, let's imagine it is. Going to step 2, let's imagine that the miscreant actually did persuade my mobile operator to enact the swap (which I still have trouble to believe happening in Luxembourg).
Step 3 says that the miscreant can now get my texts and calls, which is perfectly reasonable, and to my online banking. BZZZZZZT ! Fail. I have never used my mobe for online banking - I'm not stupid. The only apps I have installed on my mobe are Brave, to have rapid Internet access, a voice recorder and the three security authenticator apps I need to log in online with my customers.
No banking details in sight.
Now I will admit that I'm wondering about my GMail account, but since I only use it sparingly on my mobe, maybe the problems will be minimal. Although I would really like to know how the miscreant can get all the details from a virtual swap. Do mobile operators have a complete copy of the contents of my phone sim ?
That would be a breach of privacy, wouldn't it ?
Borkzilla does not define "old" the same way you or I do.
I recently upgraded the hardware of my gaming rig. The last time it got upgraded was in 2010. It was actually working fine for what I play, but I found the attractiveness of the latest RTX 3080 just too juicy to resist.
Eleven years is a period for which I can accept starting to call a config "old".
I fully expect this new config to last me well beyond 2030.
Borkzilla wants me to replace it by the end of 2023.
Borkzilla can go screw itself.
BT gets a vast reduction in taxes, suddenly finds that fibre rollout is less expensive than it thought, and will now be posting insultingly positive results and keeping the moolah to itself.
Way to go, BT shareholders ! Congratulations on having skimped on fibre rollouts until costs "miraculously" came down amid the rest of the world's industries crying panic over extended delivery lead times and vast increases in costs from sourcing materials and products.
You really are a shining example of capitalism at its finest.
Sure, because companies spending tens of millions on an ERP are going to loudly state how unsuccessful they were.
IIRC, it took a long time before any of SAP's customers dared bring out a lawsuit for non-achievement of contract. Even now that there have been a few, you never really hear about them for long (and I'm not even comparing with SCO).
So, to me, listening to "success stories" about SAP is basically listening to one guy's tale about he justified a massive yearly bonus (*).
* : as usual, caveats apply - I'm sure there are genuine success stories here and there, I just wouldn't trust an Internet forum about that.
The last time I was called on to develop a mobile-phone-compatible web app interface for a document management system under Notes, I laid down as a rule that no code would be running on the phone. All links would point to a webservice running on the Domino server.
That way, I had full control over what was expected to happen and anything outside of those boundaries was discarded. A full activity log was obviously in place as well.
Thankfully, the person who called me in for the job was the head of IT and more than a bit knowledgeable about Notes, so my proposal was accepted without question.
That has been part of my job for the past 25 years.
As a Notes consultant, I learned very early on that the person giving you the requirement list is very rarely the person who is going to use the product or even knows anything about requirements. I am used to paying close attention during the meeting, then finding out who is actually going to use the product and get to talking with them in order to find out the real requirements.
Only then can I be reasonably confident that my code is going to be useful.
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