Posts by Pascal Monett 19000 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
I love science-fiction, as I'm sure many people do. The idea that we can span the distances between stars inside of a human lifetime is tantalizing, to be sure, as is the idea that we can find other habitable planets that can support our specific life form.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty convinced that, even if we could do so, we'd just bring the same amount of lazyness and apathy to preserving the new planet as we have shown with the old.
So being stuck here right now is probably the best lesson we can get on the consequences of mismanaging planetary resources.
Again, Arizona. The driest state of the Union is where everyone is building in an industry that needs millions of gallons of water every day.
Is there some special virus in Arizona that systematically infects only semiconductor CEOs and bends their mind to choose Arizona, instead of, gosh, just about anywhere else that actually has water ?
When I read those words, I was thinking "Finally, investors are starting to take a step back from this cesspit".
Then I read the complaint : their only problem is that the stock value has dropped. Not a peep about anything Facebook is on the hook for.
Right, time to pick up my cynicism again . . . I know I left it around here. Can't be far off.
I've been using watercooling for years. If done right, it does not leak.
I would also point out that there is a high likelyhood that your motherboard has its SATA IO chips watercooled.
As for me, I have abandoned the idea of air cooling completely. Watercooling is more efficient, and quieter, even with top-of-the-range CPUs and GPUs.
Hey buddy, you trusted Microsoft. It's your fault, really.
How many more times is it going to take for people to understand ? Borkzilla launches a new tool ? Fine. Wait 'till version 3 to check it out. Wait 'till version 5 to start developing on it. Check the initial promises, compare to realization. If at V5 it's at less than 75% of initial promises, you should know that it will never get there.
Then decide what to do with it, knowing that there's a better than 50% that it will be discontinued in the next ten years.
Either that, or it will be "replaced" with something else you can no longer avoid using.
Honestly, these days you're better off with Open Source.
As iconic as the Shuttle was, and with all the services to Science it did render, the Shuttle was not economically viable.
Add to that a layer of management that pays more attention to the schedule and PR than to temperatures and engineering issues, and it is a very good thing that the Shuttle was shut down, because I am convinced that those bungling beancounters at the head of NASA would have caused another shocking failure in the following years.
And we don't need that memory.
I don't give a damn about how tiny its margins are if its profits are enormous.
If it has enormous profits, it has money to improve its moderation abilities.
And I don't care why Zuck is not taking action. The Law can make him take action.
Of course, for that we would need politicians that don't already have their heads halfway up his ass.
Stupid. Utterly stupid.
An office address is useful for being close to where you produce something. Even if it isn't tangible goods, space is an environment where there's nothing.
And it costs millions to get there. And it dangerous to human health to stay there too long. Plus, the walls of the station are paper-thin, they can be breached by a pebble of sand. And to take a shit you have to shove a tube up your ass. Not to mention the food is pre-chewed.
I very much doubt any CEO of any company is going to enjoy being in space for business purposes. Sure, fucking the secretary in zero-G won't get old soon (or will it ?), but the sheer fact is that, while he's up there, actual business is happening down here.
And let's not forget that blasting off from Earth is not 100% certain to get you into space. You can also be blasted to bits.
It is way too early for this kind of project.
Now, when we have a functional space elevator, or some other way of getting people into orbit with 99.999% reliability, then we can start looking into mining asteroids and yes, that will be a time to have an orbital business space.
But until then, get access to space secure first.
Recipe that apparently everyone is happily walking straight into, because then it's someone else's fault.
What should be done is have a build server, make sure your code works there, then port all the used code to the production server and LOCK IT DOWN. No more calls to outside libraries, everything is on-site and under control.
When the build server gets an update, CHECK THE UPDATE. Yes, AND ALL DEPENDANCIES.
It's called security. Nobody said it was easy.
The lowest pickings, the easiest targets.
Non-profits with a strong financial structure, strong internal controls and a meticulous verification of invoices are few and far between.
On top of that, as IT manager he was in an ideal position to know just what to do and how to present it to slip through the cracks.
Although he still got caught, so easy as the job was, he was still too stupid for it.
Many crooks succeed at first. It's the ones that don't get caught that are good.
That is very true.
Windows 98 SE, as fun as it was, couldn't run more than 24 hours without borking itself. Windows XP, especially in its 3rd edition, was better on that point, even though it took Windows 7 to convince me that Borkzilla could actually write an OS that didn't continually trip over its own feet.
That said, even with XP I had to reinstall from scratch every now and then, just to have a system that appeared to run smoothly. Between my computers and my friends' computers, I reinstalled XP over 300 times (yes, I counted).
Windows 7 was a true breath of fresh air on that point.
Charities are full of people with good intentions and not much know-how, especially when it comes to technical matters.
A few years ago my daughter had the intention of joining the International Red Cross for the summer and go help build housings in tsunami-devastated areas.
She came back with a sobering answer : no, because the IRC had already seen the effect of groups of well-intentioned idiots fouling everything up and ruining the projects, so now they only take experienced people on such drives.
It seems that HIV Scotland is going to learn to revamp its mailing section and ensure that only properly-trained people who know what they are doing are in charge of mailings, and that is contrary to the basics of a charity where people expect their good will should be enough.
Well sometimes it isn't.
All you need is a 256GB USB stick that is USB3-compatible.
Oh, and a tablet, of course.
Jokes aside, they're astronauts, not civil servants. They have a daily program that is regulated to the minute. They obviously do have some downtime available, but they're not going to be spending six months watching films or series.
They don't have time for that.
Oh great. China is going all Borkzilla on us now.
So, when will WeChat be a required part of Edge ?
I'm not all that certain that superapps are not going to happen in the West. The new generation is weaned on smartphones. Very few of them do anything on PCs these days. For Pete's sake, Fortnight is being played on smartphones !
And let's not forget that WeChat is actually the mobile operator Tencent. It had the chops to integrate other apps, it had the position to do so, and it ended up with the government mandate to establish it. It's all of Firefox's (useful) add-ons, but integrated together by law.
Okay, that won't happen in the West, but as new generations start with smartphones in their little hands instead of keyboards, mice and proper widescreens, well perception is going to evolve, and apps with them.
I think Borkzilla would kill to have 1.23 billion daily users on smartphones.
If I'm not mistaken, it's only the servers and command structure that went down.
There haven't been any arrests.
So these people are free to set up a new command structure. I'm sure they have backups. They'll be back online shortly.
I applaud the takedown obviously, but until those scum are in jail, they'll be back.
Which sounds like it was the perfect choice.
Thankfully, private companies have no say in democracy's choice of officers and the roles they are assigned.
Except, of course, when a nominated individual reveals himself to be worth less than pond scum, situation which has been amply demonstrated in the previous administration.
I do hope this just means that you can now also develop Android apps on Windows 11.
Which shouldn't be a news event since, if you can do so on Windows 1 0, I fail to see why it should be such a revolution to do it also on Windows 11.
And if you can't do so on Windows 1 0, why ?
This is just Borkzilla pushing 11 to the forefront.
I have zero confidence in any so-called "smart" TV.
TV makers do not know how to be smart. They have made dumb terminals for the past 100 years. They're not, all of a sudden, going to gain the necessary intelligence to make something that is indeed user-friendly and useful.
"Smart", for me, means that the object has been saddled with unnecessary restrictions, supervision, phoning home, and a very poorly thought-out UI which will annoy me every time I have to use it to get to the content I want.
I pray that my current television will hold out for many more years, pushing back the date at which I'm going to have to navigate those treacherous waters.
Yeah but the problem is always the same : as soon as you define rules to automate mailing, some idiot is going to feel that his case is special and he'll go out of his way to work around the rules and send it the way he wants.
You cannot automate against stupidity, stupidity will win every time. You need to educate stupidity.
With a cattle prod, if necessary.
Icon because integrated battery charge.
Indeed. Talk about sheeple.
The first quarantine was accompanied daily by the death total. The second quarantine was accompanied by maps in red symbolyzing hospital saturation. After that, the government stopped bothering trying to find excuses, it just says : keep wearing the masks and respect social distancing, and we all follow meekly.
The numbers are good. The French population is almost 75% vaccinated.
And yet, we still have to wear those effing masks and QR-coded COVID status is required to go out for dinner.
What's the point of the vaccination, again ?
I have always been fascinated with Borkzilla's addiction to admin-access-required drivers to do just about anything, when , under Linux, you can basically update just about everything without rebooting your computer, including the graphic drivers.
A printer driver needs admin access ? WTF for ? It's a printer, for fuck's sake. It's an OUTPUT. It's not like the printer is going to access the hard disk or RAM, it just takes whatever the program feeds it and prints it out.
Jesus Christ in a basket, why all the complication ?
Another story of waste to bolster your point :
I have been in need of a respirator for the past decade, in order to sleep properly. At the beginning, I recieved monthly invoices by snail mail and thought nothing of it. Then, after paying the invoices, I got individual snail mails with the invoice, marked "Payé" (because I'm French, living in France).
So, just to be clear, the company managing my subscription would send me three invoices every quarter - in individual envelopes containing a response envelope - and when I had paid via bank transfer, I would get three envelopes with the invoice marked "Payé".
Once I realized just how much paper was being wasted I contacted the company and asked if it was possible to get the invoices digitally at my email address - which they already had.
No, it wasn't.
I have been asking regularly since, and the answer is always the same : no.
Recently, I got a snail mail from them indicating basically that they were looking for "generous donators" to help them weather "a difficult financial situation". I took one look at that mail and said to myself : "sort out your fucking snail mail and you'll find that you'll have saved hundreds of thousands of euros on useless paper mails".
The issue, as I understand it, is that manglement sees that the current system works, and if it works, why fix it ? Here's a reason : you're wasting a ton of money when you could send your invoices digitally and save all those postage stamps.
You want help ? Start by helping yourself.
I think that's in the Bible somewhere.
Don't knock Education. The teachers need 30 copies of the day's exercise page - and they don't have 30 copies of the book to hand out.
If Education was treated as seriously as the military budget, then that wouldn't happen, but the big bucks go to the boys in uniform, so teachers have to make do with photocopies.
That's just the way it is.
Not to mention that toilet paper in the business environment is starting to look more and more like corrugated cardboard, if not actually sandpaper.
I would really like to know what the "manager's" toilet paper line is in the beancounter's ledgers, because I'm absolutely certain that they're not using the crap they give to the underlings.
Mildly because even if electromagnetic radiation is unavoidable, I live in the country in a small village. A black van parked not 50 meters from my house is going to stick out like a sore thumb, so I'm not worried for myself.
However, it is very unsettling to think that the surveillance society that are increasingly going towards is getting easier and easier to accomplish due to the technology that makes our lives more practical.
Sheesh.
And here we go again : sloppy security practices by doofuses who couldn't care less until it's too late.
Well I am actually starting to hope that such organizations do get stung. If that's what they need to learn to do their job properly, then that's where the training money should go.
It's one thing to get hacked when you have proper opsec and you discover, belatedly, that there was a hole in there somewhere where the miscreant got through. It's entirely a different story if you get hacked because you left all the doors open. In that case, you definitely deserve what you get.
Although I agree with you wholeheartedly, I don't see that miscreants outside the US are going to be much bothered by being charged with extortion by a US court.
The only way to get a grip on this is by making it an international crime and rolling it into Interpol's purview.
And even then, Russian hackers won't give a damn (nor will Chinese hackers), but it might allow for shutting down the exchanges that make it possible.
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