Posts by Pascal Monett 19014 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Decency is apparently not their best interest.
This whole thing is a vast clown show. HP ignored internal warnings and pressed ahead with a purchase it did not need because of one guy's ego, which the Board did not oppose.
HPE should just swallow the loss and shut the fuck up.
I salute her courage and her own form of protest. She is not reponsible for the budget cuts of the orange baboon and his clique of crazed monkeys.
The message is clear : the US is no longer interested in funding Science.
Another year and Trump will find a way to get rid of STEM classes entirely.
Oh wait, he's already cut the budget of education as well . . .
Well duh.
Look, I have personally seen the benefits that COVID-19 has brought (albeit to horrible expense). I am a freelance Notes specialist working in Luxembourg. Before COVID-19, I was on the road every day going to one client or another. Hours wasted in commute (Luxembourg highways are notorious for being locked up in traffic jams). Up at half past five, on the road at 6:20, get to my destination at best at 8:30 - destination that is at most 50km away. That's an average of less than half a kilometer per minute. The return trip was never much better.
During COVID-19, the lockup meant that my customers all sent me detailed log-on credentials and procedures. Suddenly, I could work from home, log into a secure VPN from my professional laptop (or I was given a company laptop), and work continued. Targets were hit, progress was attained. Life went on. I had a discussion with one IT manager during that period and I told him : "Look, you call me and, if I'm available, I'm logged in and working within 10 minutes. Before, we'd have to schedule a day for me to come in, which might have been tomorrow, or next week depending on my workload and when you were able to recieve me. Isn't this better ?".
It was. But now it's almost over. The majority of my customers have recovered their precious laptops, forcing me to once again go to their office. Those for whom I have a VPN login have, for the most part, left it active - probably because they appreciate the reactivity more than having me occupy a desk in their workspace (some people are actually intelligent).
The fact is : in my line of work, working from my office/home office is 100% efficient - and sometimes I even stay logged on just to see the result of an agent running after hours (without billing that time - hey, I'm just logged on with my work computer, while I wait I'm playing Diablo III on my gaming rig).
I do not have a crystal ball, I have no idea where the workplace is going. I am sure, however, that if we manage to get beyond the "I need to count my peons and see them sweat" type of management, working will be better and more productive for everyone.
In these conditions, I don't need a 4-day week to feel and be productive.
Only in computing do you see so much effort deployed for something that few people actually knew and almost nobody has any more.
Yes, I know that there are people who go through a lot of trouble to restore vintage cars, but somehow it does not strike me as so incredibly useless and impressive at the same time.
Yup.
That's the problem I find with the penguin community. They all laugh at you when you're on Windows, but choose one distro and you get yourself a barrage of insults because you didn't choose their preferred distro.
For all the holier-than-thou behavior of the Linux community, there is a whole lot of pre-teen testosterone behavior in a lot of them.
I absolutely second your point.
I was once involved, as IT support, in a project that was supposed to be a non-profit organizing IT trainings for the poor in order to help them get positions in the workplace. A laudable goal, I thought, so I participated gladly.
At one point, the lead responsible made an off-hand remark about how expensive MS Office was and I immediately offered to install LibreOffice for them, explaining that it was free and had all the functionality they needed. I was showered in thanks and installed LO on their five admin laptops (admin because they were the non-profit management, not because they had any particular IT skills).
A few weeks later I went back to configure this and that, par for the course for a non-profit project, and the lead responsible commented on the fact that everyone had gone back to Excel and Word because LibreOffice was "too complicated".
I kept my mouth shut and made a noncommittal "hm hmm" noise.
From what I've heard since, that non-profit has dissolved into nothing.
Well :
1. There was no central database to check whether he had an exiting loan : that's called administrative overhead - the less you have, the better right ? England prevails and all that.
2. The loans were granted based on a claim of over stated earnings without checking last audited accounts : It was difficult times. The Government did the best it could. God Save The Queen.
3. The responsibility for distributing public funds was given to banks : okay, but seriously, who should have shouldered that responsibility ? Hospitals ?
I agree that the whole management of COVID-19 was a vastly overinflated mess, but the small fry are getting fried now.
The big fish will, of course, continue par for the course and get away scot-free.
It requires a coder. Someone with experience who will understand what you are asking, what the caveats are, and how to implement it on your choice of platform.
In any case, you went from "Wow, this is great ! I'm a coder !" to "Jesus, this thing is shit and I don't trust it" in record time.
And you paid for the privilege.
Yup.
1984, Brazil, and other works (of perfectly valid content and justifiable intentions) were all based on the idea that it is Goverment that is the watchful eye responsible for a dystopian future.
Then along came Facebook and it's been a downhill ride ever since.
I'm rather happy that George Orwell is already dead, because he would certainly have a heart attack if he saw what our "modern" civilization has become.
No. You regret getting caught.
There was no confusion. There was you slipping in a bit of text written by a highly-paid besuited Porsche-driving lawyer to ensure that, in the future, all of your options were open and available.
Unfortunately, it would appear that there are people who actually bother to take the time to read those coma-inducing piles of legalese (no, it's not English, it's its own language) and who have enough knowledge themselves to decrypt and unravel the truth behind the waffling.
And it would appear that, this time, they are not your friends.
Who knew ?
On this you are perfectly right.
Huawei got crucified because it was Chinese. No proof, no demonstration of vulnerability, just chanting over and over again "Huawei must obey Beijing. It's a threat to our security !"
Well, Cisco must obey Washington, but I don't hear anybody complaining. And Cisco is apparently a very real threat to our security.
Unfortunately, business and infrastructure do not learn until something blows up in their face.
Infrastructure has been warned repeatedly and continuously for the past 25 years. It hasn't changed anything, apparently.
As for business, what to say ? I guess it costs less to get hacked than it does to have competent people doing their job. That's a Board-level decision and, if they're happy with the consequences, I don't care more than they do.
Your reply sparked a thought and I tried doing some research.
I found this, and I thought I should share.
People can, and sometimes do, kill. No question there. The circumstances matter, though.
If I find someone raping my daughter or my wife, he had better pray that the police are not far because I will slaughter him with the nearest sharp or blunt object I can get my hands on.
If you attack me with the clear intent of ending my life (for whatever reason), and I have a gun at hand, I will defend myself and shoot you. If I don't have a gun, I will fight for my life and if you die, well, you started it.
If you tell me that thousands of invaders are coming, give me an assault rifle and a handful of mags, and ask me to defend my fellow citizens, I do believe I will try to make every bullet count.
But if you hand me that gun and mags, ship me off to a place I've never been before and might not even have ever heard of, and then order me to go kill some people I don't know and never will for some reason that has nothing to do with me, I'm not convinced that I will become Rambo and go kill everything that moves.
Whether or not this claim is valid, it does indicate that future warfare is not going to content itself with only what is happening on the front lines.
If Napoleon failed to conquer Russia with his Great Army, if Hitler failed to even get to Moscow, if the Japanese failed to hold their conquests in the Pacific during WWII, it all boils down to supply.
I don't remember the exact figures, but I seem to remember that, in WWII, for every US soldier sent into battle, there were 100 people working 24/7 to get him his ammo, food, gear and whatever else he needed.
Napoleon said an army marches with its stomach. That may have been enough back in the day, but today's modern armies need way more than just food.
And successfully hindering any part of that supply line could make quite a difference in the final outcome.
And be a good little boy and play nice. For fuck's sake, I can understand that Marketing believes this bullshit but how in the world can anyone with functioning neurons swallow this and actually believe it ?
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Stop pretending. Wake the fuck up.
Or do I have to drop in the Board meetings with a cluebat ? Because I'm starting to think I do, and I'm starting to kinda want to do it.
Indeed. And the AMD Thunderbird was the first sign that Intel was on its way to the old people's home.
AMD fought tooth and nail to climb and gain recognition, while Intel puttered about. Sure, in the 90s Intel was the king, no question there. But when AMD was first to have a Ghz CPU, Intel should have seen the writing on the wall.
It didn't.
As usual, it's the employees that will pay the big price, while the Board and management will retain their high salaries and bonuses and get hired elsewhere with similar paychecks.
Yet, it is not the employees who failed.
And, pray tell, why is that not happening ?
Does Google not have enough computing power to make its portal secure ? Does it not have enough money for that ?
It doesn't give a flying fuck is the problem.
<old man ranting mode ON>Once upon a time, we didn't have the luxury of downloading updates. We had to wait for the next month's magazine CD to deliver an update to us (if we were lucky). Magazine that we had to pedal uphill to get, and we had to pedal uphill to go back home and install it. That's why our programs worked, because they had to.<old man ranting mode forgotten being ON>.
Mumble, mumble, kids these days . . .
"The FBI covers more ground than the NCA. Unlike its UK cousins, the feds are tasked with investigating crimes such as murders and armed robberies, and it also leads on counter-terrorism, none of which fall under the NCA's remit. "
So, the argument the NCA is advancing is that the FBI has to cover more territory, more types of crime and also follow leads on counter-terrorism, so their numbers are better.
Let's turn that around, shall we ? The NCA has one thing to look at in a comparatively puny part of the world and it is still three times less efficient than the FBI.
I don't see that argument making you look good, NCA.
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