Posts by Pascal Monett 19554 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
They haven't done muck to help take over Ukraine in the last four years of the 3-week "special military operation", now have they ?
Instead of whining about Russian hacktivists, the USA would do better to harden access to its infrastructure - which is only something that specialists have been warning about for about a decade, at a minimum.
It's no use going to cry about your security if your lock is 100 years old and can be picked with a hairpin.
There is no such thing as a "discreet hole in the wall".
It's a bloody hole in the wall and I'm going to notice. Plus, there is no drill that hoovers the dust it makes at the end of the drill bit, so there will be a pile dust and a burst wall hole on the other side. You'd have to be blind or full of opiates/alcohol to not notice.
If I find a hole in the wall I'm calling the police, and your little stunt is going to end very badly, for you.
I love spy novels, but this is beyond credibility.
Oh it's going to make an impact, all right.
It's going to create so much bullshit and chaos that even Board administrators are going to want to rehire actual humans to deal with problems.
But, given that it's the Board, by the time they get the numbers, it will be way too late for a lot of people.
I'll bet you are. Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 are heavily used in enterprise environments, and having their workforce at a standstill is not the kind of thing CEOs appreciate.
Too bad you didn't have anyone around to test the update before you spewed it onto the masses, eh ?
Versus the tendancy of company mergers to completely disregard any previous obligations in order to dicate the "new future" defined by the Board doing the acquisition, which is also actively defining how many "acquired" personnel it can get rid of under the excuse of "redundancy".
I've always found interesting that the acquiring company has never found any of its Board members to be "redundant" . . .
"If China now has the capacity to make such models without hardware from Nvidia or AMD, that’s a threat to those chip design firms’ future revenue "
Hey, Trump, you might have wanted to think about the consequences before spouting your bullshit against China and forcing them to homegrow their own industry.
Of course, that would mean that you had knoweldge about History (which you clearly don't), and were aware that China already manufactures 90% of what we buy, following our specifications and our industrial expertise.
Which means that China has that industrial expertise.
In other words, our wonderful Western multinationals have spent the last 50 years years teaching Chinese personnel to develop products to Western specifications, and now we are supposed to be surprised that China is capable of going on its own to develop its own industry, completely disregarding Western (aka USA) dictates ?
How's that TIVO working for you, Donald ?
And AI doesn't improve productivity.
Some day soon, the Board will have to deal with this issue.
Preferably before the investors sur themselves again (the term "cutting off your nose to spite your face" comes to mind).
PS: on a side note, who was the idiot who decided that investors had the right to sue the company they invested in ? If you don't like what the company is doing, go put your money somewhere else, period.
Oh come on, Borkzilla doesn't need AI coding to screw up.
Where it screwed up was when it fired its QA department. That, apparently, happened after 2015.
Now, the fact that Redmond has just let go of 9000 more developers in its quest to replace them hallucinating bullshit generators probably doesn't help.
I remain convinced that Borkzilla is the greatest advocate of Linux and Open Source software there is.
Absolutely this.
And, I have already said, the quoted piece from Mr Pesce clearly demonstrates that Vibe coding does not allow inexperienced programmers to produce a working program.
That's just what the homepage marketing team wants to spout.
I agree that Vibe coding can provide a stirrup to point you in the right direction, but from that point on, you're on your own. You are NOT going to get a 100% functional piece of code that corresponds to your particular needs and use cases from an automated bullshit generator.
So I am very glad that Mr Torvalds, for whom I have the greatest respect, has come out and said what he said about this new fad.
His voice is heavy in IT circles, like a black hole is heavy in the fabric of space-time.
My trial was unfair ! The Police had no right to search my comms and find all those incriminating items ! They were encrypted, meaning that no one but me and my 'friends' had the right to access those texts !
What do you mean, encryption does not protect criminals ? Encryption protects privacy ! You have violated my privacy !
What ? Bend over ? Why ? What's a 'cavity search' ? AAARRRGGHHH ! You're violating my privacy again !
What is this bunch of teenagers put in charge of building a housing website in London (forget "affordable" - unless you're already a multi-millionnaire) ?
The could have a least used Lorem Ipsum as a text generator, which would have given them a slight sheen of respectability (that should definitely avoid the hairy clown pics).
Indeed. If staff need more time, then the training procedures (assuming they existed) were inadequate and/or (emphasis on and) badly thought-through.
Everything I have ever read about Birmingham Council's management points to incompetent management positing wishful-thinking as actual expectations and then scrambling to cover-up and spend even more money under the pretense that they know what they're doing and some "exterior force" (in this case, stupid staff) requires more time and expenditure.
No. Your incompetence in outlining the requirements properly is the first step in this abysmal failure, and the rest has just snowballed from there.
Sir Humphry would no doubt explain that they had not recieved the proper form requesting the removal of Fujitsu from the database of accepted government providers, explaining that the Civil Service cannot possibly keep track of all of the declarations made by public figures and take them as executive orders without the proper documentation to justify the changes required.
As for Fujitsu, well, they don't speak English (which might explain a lot of things).
"Microsoft meanwhile would very much like to find a relationship between AI investment and increasing growth "
Well duh, you don't go investing billions in a pipe dream without expecting to get billions more out of it, now do you ?
Except that Redmond has forgotten (or, more generously, not taken into account) a few small details : AI is not holding up to the hype and, more importantly, computer components are looking to vastly increase in cost in 2026 and beyond - especially if Trump abandones Taiwan to China (which is a possibility no serious publication is ignoring at this point).
Given that "datacenters" are now going to have to be built with their own bespoke nuclear power station, the cost of sourcing their components is going to be multiplied by an amount that any Board is going to find difficult to swallow, compared to the revenue they might generate.
AI investment is starting to look a lot riskier given that existing AI does not measure up to expectations, so more of the same that costs several times more to build and maintain (and you might want to avoid building that in Texas - just a suggestion) is not really looking like a winning business case at this point in time.
I'm sure El Zuck is not at all concerned about China's evident intention to take Taiwan, which has generated a vast amount of news articles about how that will crash the IT industry as we know it.
Not to mention that all those datacenters are going to need their own nuclear power generators (sorry, Greenpeace aficionadoes, but solar and wind doesn't find the 24/7 bill for keeping those things functional and cooled).
Does His Zuckiness intent to become a nuclear-power magnate as well as as a personal-data hooverer ? He might find that the second was vastly easier than the first.
Especially if IT hardware costs increase by the 100% to 300% that is being forecast.
It is high time that we drop the "AI" moniker for what are nothing but statistical analysis machines.
There are domains where such tech is useful. Discovering Earth-sized planets in satellite data (with a large definition of "Earth-sized"), discovering new Near-Earth asteroids, etc.
But it has already been demonstrated that pseudi-AI fails diséally when being asked to build a legal defense (I wonder why those lawyers weren't disbarred, BTW), or when "analysing" X-Ray scans of medical patients (a proper doctor still needs to review the results to verify that they are correct - which is hardly always the case).
So, given that lawyers are already paid quite enough to do their jobs, and given that analyzing an X-Ray scan is a skill that pseudo-AI is still too far from mastering, lets keep this bubble in the realm of where it can actually be useful : analyzing reams of data to find new asteroids, planets, star systems and galaxies (or even black holes).
Those are domains that do not put human life in danger, can allow for follow-up confirmation which can eventually take years without any large impact and won't cause mayhem in every-day human life.
Humans can make mistakes. Even the best doctor might refer to a colleague to verify his findings if he is troubled enough by the consequences. But if we put pseudo-AI in charge of health analysis, I have the distinct feeling that the global overpopulation problem will find a quick solution.
I'm starting to think that this is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Redmond has been so estranged from its customers' needs for so long that it still believes that it can dictate company IT spending.
If the current doomsayers' oracles come to pass and Taiwan is absorbed by China, then several immediate consequences will come to light :
1) companies (and users) will no longer upgrade until the kit physically fails
2) Open-Source firewalls and other network surveillance tools will become the defacto resource for securing computers that Borkzilla has decided are no longer worthy of its attention
3) By the time Redmond wakes up to the apocalypse, Linux on the desktop might just have become a thing
And now I'm going to go take my dried frog pills. Nurse !
All those datacenters for ever more pseud-AI "assistants" and user-data storage are going to go down the tubes then, and Borkzilla & Co are going to have to start actually optimizing what they've got, instead of just blindly adding racks to ever more energy-and-resource-gobbling useless buildings situated in tax-haven deserts (looking at you Texas, Utah and every other state who depends on the dying Colorado river for their water needs - if they can even keep those running).
Windows NT 4.0 was the last (and maybe only) Borkzilla OS certified by the US DOD to be secure - in a standalone configuration.
I am convinced that if Portugal "upgrades" their terminals to Windows 11, they will basically have no end of troubles until they finally understand that Linux is the way to go for long-term stability.
Stability has been crossed out of Redmond's dictionary since Y2K.
Go ahead and try. Then find yourself facing the wave of helicopter parents who abosutely have to have tabs on their sprogs at every moment of day.
It's a wonder that Humanity has survived the past 300,000 years without parents being able to track the location of their offspring . . .
As usual, but that doesn't matter.
You've sold a product and you have tens of thousands of customers paying annual licenses for those products. You're duty is to continue maintaining those products until there is no one left using them.
You've got the money to do so, so honor the contract. Stop thinking that you can make companies dance to your tune or, sooner than later, you'll find that they're not listenining to your tune anymore.
Microsoft, the best advocate for Open Source there has ever been.
I'm sorry, it seems to be that you're talking about a sovereign country, not a "cabal".
That's the problem with US-based conglomerates. They are so used to paying lobbyists to make sure that "the law" is in their favor that, whenever they meet any kind of legal resistance they cannot control, they go the tried-and-true US-way of invoking conspiracy theories.
You don't like the conditions ? Go ahead and pull out. You'll be leaving the spot to the competition and you know it.
China has its own homegrown IT culture, even more ever since the orange shitgibbon has done his level best to convince Beijing that that was the way to go.
India, on the other hand, may have the population, but it has not been asked by The WestTM to provide it with millions of tons of The WestTM-defined shitty products, to the point that China has many times more the experience required to build its own ecosystem than India does (and, come to think of it, many more times than The WestTM does).
Not to mention the amount of Chinese nationals who have been caught stealing industrial secrets from The WestTM and sending them back to the homeland.
I'd like to see a comparison of the number of Chinese nationals being condemned for theft of industrial secrets in the USA versus the number of India nationals and, more importantly, the number of US nationals being caught in China stealing chinese industrial secrets (that last part is almost a joke, given that China had practically no industrial secrets it hasn't stolen from The WestTM).
Musk does not know what those words mean.
If he did, he would not block people who provide (justifiable) complaints against his site.
Free speech is for everyone, but Musk bought Twitter (being forced to do so because His Business Geniusness hadn't bothered reading the small print) and transformed it into His Platform Of Speech, Free be damned.
And it's not surprising that he reinstated a bunch a Nazi-wannabes but shuts down anyone who posts against him.
Frankly, this asshole doesn't deserve the money he has.
. . then please resign from your post immediately and go follow a training course in Web Security 101 before looking for a new job. McDonalds might help you in the meantime.
Seriously, this kind of problem had existed since the Web has become a thing. Controlling user-input data and securing access are the basics of secure programming.
It's time to get the incomptent idiots out of the user-data arena. They can go and screw up the data for the Board's precious Excel charts and find out how long their career will last then.
Another wonderful idea that ends up being a threat portal for your abysmal operating system. I seem to recall that, from day one, somebody already suggested that fake BSODs with malware-tailored QRcodes could be used to infiltrate a user's system.
Honestly, Microsoft, the only reason you are still alive is because Bill Gates had the genius to flood schools with early versions of Windows so as to hook kids on it, kids who later became job seekers who needed to proficient in . . Windows (because that saved on training costs and because "managers" didn't know anything else).
The day will come when Linux reigns supreme. I know I won't see it, but my daughter's children might. Okay, shush. Don't go detroying my dream.
Sorry guys, but the police are not going to be of any aid on this issue.
What they know is biometric forensics, how to shake down an "informant" (aka, criminal left loose because his info is worth more than throwing him into jail), or how to block roads so that "important" people can drive through unmolested by ignorant "citizens", aka the very people they are supposed to be working for (hey, you were elected, right ? You weren't elected to play king, you were elected to serve).
What needs to be done is double the IT budget, hire sombody who actually knows something about securing networks, and getting on with business.
And I tell everyone about it for their smartphones. Brave has saved me an untold quantity of data bandwidth by cutting out what I don't need and leaving me with what I actually want to see on that damn handheld screen (that I hate - mostly because my customers have my number and some of them have no notion of what time is too late to phone someone).
I have installed Brave on all my computers and laptops as well, and I have made it the default for my wife's laptop, my daughter's laptop, and I am endlessly advocating it to anyone who will listen if the conversation crops up.
Fuck ads. Long live Brave (and Firefox with NoScript and uBlock Unity).
I will join you there.
I used to have a litteral barrel-full of LEGO bricks of all sorts. I could build planes, spaceships, warehouses, police cars, motorbikes, castles, fire stations, moon bases (yes, I had six moonbase tiles in addition to the dozen regular road tiles) - you name I could do it.
A few years ago, my (at the time) 9-year old nephew was thrilled when he got the Saturn rocket kit for XMas. He spent XMas morning building it, and I was on-hand to oversee the project.
And once it was done ? Well, there isn't much else you can do with it, now is there ?
Once upon a time, LEGO kits were sold with an included manual that showed you how to build the kit as sold, but also included ideas of what else you could build with the pieces included.
That time is gone. You buy a Star Wars A-Wing and you won't build anything else but an A-Wing. It will take a large collection of Star Wars kits to be able to even start thinking of a new something to do with all those specific, specialised pieces.
That makes me sick. LEGO has become the domain of grown-ups who used to have imagination and are now happy to buy the latest, piece-specific set of their dreams. Never mind that their imagination will server them no more, they're just happy to have an X-Wing, a Tie fighter and a Millenium Falcom on their shelves, never to be used for anything but gathering dust.
Pathetic.
The USA has proven, beyond any semblance of doubt, that it can no longer be depended on as a serious partner and ally in the long term. Even if Obama got re-elected, it wouldn't change that fact.
As things stand now, it's not even certain that Trump would order US forces to defend Taiwan if (when ?) China tries to invade.
Since this absolute absence of intelligence has been re-elected by all the Democrats not bothering to vote, his mantra has been "why pay US dollars for everyone else's benefit ?". What is beyond his single-neuron mind is that the US is not paying for everyone else, it is ensuring global peace. That is a position that people vastly more intelligent that him (Eisenhower, to start with) have understood since decades, but given that His Orangeness fires anyone who gives him a headache, there's a fair chance that Xi is going to have a good shot at taking over the world's prime CPU manufacturer.
Since the orange shitgibbon prefers McDonalds, he won't see the problem and won't care about any consequences since he won't feel any.
That concept is sooo last millenium.
These days, it's all about paying insane costs for "CloudTM" and bragging about "AI integration".
Don't worry. The Board will soon realize that they can't give themselves their usual bonuses because their "AI"-integrated business is not making enough money for that anymore, so they will adapt.
How many workers will be laid off in the meantime is another issue . . .
