Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
And as long as they can't, they're just toys for (billoinnaire) boys.
Billionnaire will billionnaire, but their toys are going to have to become useful if they want to make anything out of it.
People are not going to pay $100K to spend two minutes at the edge of space.
Has got what to do with FaceBook ?
And why is the military preoccupied by that ?
It's a government issue. If the government can't be arsed to keep the peace, then it calls the military. That's when the military needs to intervene.
And, since the UK is, nominally, a democracy, the military should have nothing to do with social unrest because the solution is a change of government.
It's called elections. They're still a thing.
If a government goes so wrong as to spark a revolution, the military will be informed.
It does not need to follow Beijing's lead.
Putting more pressure on OS makers, industry and IoT-shite makers to secure their platforms.
As bad as it may seem, in some cases this pressure might not be a bad thing. It is going to push industry to better safety practices, maybe cleaning up their act and doing a better job overall. That will benefit everyone.
Oh, and maybe, just maybe, all those unsecured cloud databases will become a thing of the past. I can dream, can't I ?
But attacking hospitals for money should mean a bullet in the head. No pity there.
And here we go.
Content deemed dubious in China ? Tienanmen Square.
Content deemed dubious elsewhere ? Good people on both sides, I won Arizona, the election was rigged, etc . . .
Let me give you my definition of dubious content : when it's a bald-faced lie, it's dubious. Otherwise, it's freedom of speech.
You have the right to call me an idiot, that's your opinion and you are entitled to it. You do not have the right to deny historical facts. The Holocaust happened. We landed on the Moon. Tienanmen Square happened. The Twin Towers were not a controlled demolition. The election was not rigged.
Period.
I know that, where email is concerned, it is really easy to fuck up even when you're trying to do things right.
However, it must be said that it would make things simpler if you could compare the recipients actually generated to the list you're expecting before sending out the mailing.
I do not know of any tool that allows you to do that. Of course, you could use Word and generate the mails before sending them off to Outlook, but that is you doing the job. I'm thinking of something integrated in your mailing tool that does the job and flags any discrepancies before proposing to send it all.
Those two words just don't go together.
The Law is just a tool for the State to wield in order to crush whoever it is that is getting in the way. Putin will lift his phone, say "I want that guy to go down", and all the judges and police will do their best to find anything they can pretend to make stick.
State treason ? In Russia it is state treason to not like Putin.
We have achieved videoconferencing for the masses. We can even use our smartphones for that now, something that the phone industry promised decades ago but failed to deliver.
The result ? Everybody hates it.
Now, we are witnessing a new gimmick : pics which have some depth to them. To make it work, you have to have bespoke hardware. That is very much going to limit the market. Yet another thing with batteries to follow.
It's an interesting idea, but I want it on my 26" widescreen.
Oh sure, I'm sure that won't be a problem what with the screens, PSU, keyboard, sound and network cables, among other things, that are attached in the back.
And yes, I obviously want to squat under the desk every time I have to interact physically with the tower.
Brilliant idea !
Well said.
That is not the problem of the manager who championed it, then left to go champion it again somewhere else.
I'm starting to hate cloud. Did you know that tower cases now come without any place to use an optical drive, or any ability to plug in a USB key on the front panel ?
I recently upgraded my PC which had been chugging along since 2010 and thought hey, while I'm at it, why not change tower ? Well today's towers expect you to throw all your data to the cloud.
I wonder how they expect people to reinstall Windows ?
Because that does happen, you know.
Oh, silly me, you bring it to a repair shop to pay a PFY to hook up an external USB optical drive and do the install you can't do anymore.
Obviously.
Which is what you're supposed to do in the first place, instead of paying miscreants and thus encouraging them to continue.
I don't know what's worse : the idiots who click the bloody link that gets them infected, or the fucking morons who pay good money to get hacked again.
"That's a combination of the notion that if you're away learning you're not doing the job you were hired for, and the fear that you'll take the training and immediately demand extra pay or bugger off to a better job. Which you wouldn't do if you really liked where you worked, but this idea might as well be written in hieroglyphics in many workplaces. "
That is so true it hurts.
Simple answer :
This option has been considered and, after much research (and an exploratory team sent to the Bahamas to witness cloud deployment on-site), the conclusion that imposes itself is that Cloud is not secure, not fit to host citizen's private data, not reliable enough, prone to lock-in and more expensive than it seems.
Therefor, for this contract, an on-prem solution will be preferred.
And there you go, problem solved.
Yeah, the lawyers thing. What the hell are they supposed to be doing at this point in time ? GDPR control to ensure that the IT guys aren't sneaking peeks at payroll data ?
You solve the technical problem, then you bring in the lawyers to sue somebody's pants off.
This is putting the cart before the horse. That rarely works well.
Unless . . . unless the lawyers are already drafting a defense against the sueballs that will be coming their way.
That might be it.
"You just do not get the same level of job satisfaction or client adulation when supporting clients remotely, do you? "
I feel fine working from my home office. I have a new customer that wants me on site now, and the highway and parking experience are every bit as horrible as I remember FBC (From Before COVID). Thankfully, that customer only signed for 3 days a week, and it would appear that, some days, I might be able to work remotely again.
I must have been a cave troll in a previous life.
I understand two things in this plan :
1) there is finally a chance that I no longer have to store 50 different chargers "just in case"
2) Apple is no longer to make a mint by purposefully designing chargers that are just slightly different for every one of its models so that it can extract a maximum of additional moolah from the idiots that buy from it
I think I would be quite happy with point #1 if I bought Apple gear, and I am very, very happy with with point #2 in any case.
Stop the waste. Be more customer-friendly.
Besides, your phones hardly differ from one year to the next. Stop churning out clones every 12 months.
Of course.
And you noticed that as soon as the lawsuit landed on your desk.
Congratulations on your foresight.
Facebook : when it comes to El Zuck's reputation, nothing is too expensive, but when it comes to behaving properly and policing its content correctly, that's too much.
Could somebody please shut this sewer rat down ?
"26 per cent of surveyed technology workers consider themselves 'elite performers' "
I am not an "elite" performer, I am a friggin' god of performance. If my salary was based on my personal assessment of my performance, I'd be paid €60,000 per month.
Unfortunately, I'm not really the one determining my salary, my clients are. So, as long as they keep calling me (and paying me), I am still the god of performance.
As long as it is clear that the bare minimum is being able to arrive at one's destination without plowing through a tree, another vehicle, a cyclist or a pedestrian, then I'm fine with that.
If, however, your "bare minimum" includes a monthly subscription to avoid baby strollers, you can fuck right off.
There is no bare minimum in autonomous vehicles. Either it does the job perfectly, or it is useless.
Strippers are a bonus. Millionnairs can pay for that. The rest of us just need it to work.
It seems rather obvious to me that all these info screens that bork because Borkzilla's system is inherently faulty are completely useless.
Not one of them have ever stopped a bus, train or cable car from functioning as intended.
Do away with the cruft already. If you want to display information, use Linux and configure it properly.
A bit much like Red Sparrow. Frankly, those Russkies should extend their lexicon a bit.
"The kill-switch is intended to be used by the operators only "
I think there is a very good kill switch available : the 9mm Parabellum.
You only need to know where to apply it.
Sorry, if you publish it, you cannot then pretend that you did not approve it.
You're not FaceBook, YouTube or a blog platform. You do not have the excuse that you don't know what your users publish. You're a journal and you are responsible for what you publish.
If you do not want to be their mouthpiece, then don't publish their bullshit.
That's like ATMs. Yes, they cost to put into service, but then they cost next to nothing to use and you can run them until they break down.
Now, an ATM doesn't have much as far as moving parts are concerned, but these robots seem to only have wheels - there are no arms or swivel head, so as long as the wheels are functional, they're good to go.
Managed by an outsourced company and put, obviously, in The Cloud - because apparently everyone has forgotten how to secure access to an internal server.
Well apparently they can also forget how to secure a cloud server. From an internal keyboard jockey that can be understandable, but from an outsourced company that presumably got the contract on the basis that it knew the job, it is not.
I hope that there will be sanctions against that company.
Thaler declares "we were very encouraged by the dissent of Lord Justice Birss who agreed with us that 'the creator of the inventions in this case was a machine is no impediment to patents being granted to this applicant…' "
What the judge said is "if Thaler had a "genuine belief" that DABUS was the inventor, and if the Intellectual Property Office had decided to record no such person on the forms, there was no reason to deny the patent "
Those two things are not the same. The judge did not "agree" that the inventor was a machine, he said that no name on a patent was not a reason not to have it filed.
That is how you manipulate opinion.
Are people who go to client site to do their jobs.
If they're not good enough, their claim is in the gutter and they won't be hired again.
A certification is not going to help, and I have known certified people who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.
You spend an entire paragraph on 5G saying that it is all about processing close to the user.
Then you try to contradict that by saying that airplanes need to use local processing.
Well, that's about as close to the user as you can get.
I don't see the difference : in both cases, data is not being processed centrally.
One is not a contradiction to the other.
I'm glad the Royal Navy is able to spend that much time determining with precision who is to do what.
I do hope they do not use that system when it comes to targeting and weapon firing in combat, though.
What really worries me is the "we no longer have the skills to operate a paper chart " part. That clearly means that, in case the computers go down, the Royal Navy (and probably every other navy in the world) is dead in the water.
That part doesn't sound too good.
Far from a networking or server expert, but it seems to me that a server farm, with proper power and cooling and redundancy (not to mention bandwidth), costs a pretty penny.
And, if you want to give any sort of availability assurance to your potential customers, you have to have more than one.
That's likely to eat up a big chunk of those millions (well, faster than chairs would).
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