Posts by Pascal Monett 19006 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
I guess I should count myself lucky.
My work laptop is an HP Elitebook 8560w, and it doesn't have a WiFi switch, it has four buttons with a LED that shines either orange or white (when the laptop is on, of course), one of which has the WiFi icon.
If I want to connect to WiFi, I press the button, the LED goes from orange to white, then I can connect.
A rare case when HP did something right, I guess.
Oh for fuck's sake can we stop with the nanny society ?
Adults know when they interrupt. Adults also know when the interruption is justified. And they should be able to handle when it is not.
Computers are not the answer to everything.
42 is.
Knock it off. I don't need a friggin' AI to tell me when I can speak.
I acknowledge that Facebook's regular skirting at the edge of the law puts it in fine position to know how the law works, but it is still ferociously ironic for Facebook to educate a government institution focusing on competition how it should interpret the law.
I expect Facebook to be brutally slapped down on this one.
Great. Illiteracy is a growing problem.
Solution ? Instead of putting in the effort to curb illiteracy, let's make everyone more stupid.
Wonderful. Civilization really is going places.
Mainly down, but still, we're going places.
That an SSD can detect infection is already a surprise to me, but what really takes the cake is the "unexpected encryption" part of that declaration.
Please explain to me how an SSD can tell if an encryption is expected or not.
How can an SSD make the difference between the used deciding to encrypt files on the SSD and malware residing in RAM doing it ?
I would really like to know, and then explain to me how a malware author is not going to be able to replicate that.
Is just an excuse to give money hand over fist to someone without expecting anything in return, or at least, anything useful in return.
How is it that, in the 3rd Millennium of our common age, there are still people who write up commercial orders without a clue as to what they expect in return ?
Could that moron please be fired ?
"it feels like it would be a very ill-advised move for a big tech megacorp like Facebook to bring down the hammer on innocent users who are simply trying to interoperate "
It also feels that it would be very ill-advised for Facebook to flout Congressional hearings and lie to the face of elected representatives across the world, but hey, that doesn't stop The Zuck from doing it (although, curiously, not in China - I wonder why ?).
Gigantic megacorp bad mouths rival gigantic magecorp leader that is trouncing it in one specific market.
None of the arguments are very impressive, given where they are coming from, but hey, Bezos has now firmly demonstrated his total lack of class and willingness to stoop to any level to try and get his way.
Funny, there was a time when that was called "leadership" . . .
Failure is not a crime indeed, that's why nobody is prosecuting Magic Leap for completely failing to deliver on the massive hype it generated.
But when you're pushing a product that is supposed to help save lives and your product is not only a dud, but you know it so well that you are asking another company to do the tests for you, you deserve to go down hard.
And pretending that she has a mental condition ? That's only a guarantee that she should be barred from ever holding a position of responsibility again.
Lying scum right up until the end.
God did not invent scientists. We did that with the intelligence God graced us with.
Just as God does not punish us with landslides, floods or avalanches. We do that by not paying attention to where the dangers are when writing the zoning rules.
Stop attributing to God things that are our own responsibility.
The day the asteroid comes, it will be our fault if we're not ready and God will have had nothing to do with it.
Oh I think Borkzilla has great people on board. That is why I simply cannot comprehend the Metro UI, or pushing dev updates to the live channel, or printergate.
It's almost as if the people giving the orders were an order of magnitude less competent than the people actually doing the work.
That's probably the reason why Borkzilla got rid of its QA department - too much trouble to deal with, much more comfortable to push a patch you think is ready and deal with the fallout (no, it isn't, but that's how it seems).
I agree with your point.
To be explicit, for me socialism is a society where money is good, but money is not everything. Health care is primordial, education is primordial, transport infrastructure is primordial, and the laws should be tailored in favor of the population's needs, not in favor of multinational conglomerates.
Right, Texas ?
I absolutely agree on who is responsible for Tor, but intelligence agencies were absolutely a part of it.
The quote I refer to is this :
"The core principle of Tor, Onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect U.S. intelligence communications online. "
The CIA and the NSA have their hands in this, make no mistake.
As for the bridge, I'm sorry but that it is traditional Internet-speak :).
As for your feathers, are they frozen ?
Indeed.
A true professional programmer is not just a guy who knows how to code, it is a person who knows what to do in a given environment with respect to data security and operational procedures.
And now GDPR.
One day, professional programmers will be held to the same standards as engineers.
And that will be a Good Thing (TM).
Should not exist.
If you write your code properly, you know what variables you use and why. This is not a crapshoot, developers do not generally declare variables without a reason.
If you have an unused variable, you need to check why it is unused because there is a chance that your code might be using some other variable instead, and that's when mayhem happens.
If your variable is truly unused for good reason, then remove the declaration and recompile.
Good code is clean code.
Back in the day when I was learning how to program with IBMs BASICA compiler, I learned that there is not a single compiler message that does not warrant attention. If you have more than one definition of a variable in the Common area, you're in trouble.
These days, I code business applications. An error is when an indispensable resource is not available. A warning is when a document is missing a given parameter. If the code encounters an error, it logs the problem and bails out. If it encounters a warning, it logs the problem and soldiers on to the next item.
But I code for high-level applications, ie not kernel-level code. I cannot imagine a kernel module that has a "warning" like "HDD not available" that should not be looked into.
And since last winter they haven't finalized the installation procedure ?
This is not a BSOD, which could signal insufficient disk space or a failed component. This is a "you haven't finished doing the job", and that means that somebody got paid for jack all.
I may be a stickler for efficiency, but this is clearly a case of someone who got paid for something they didn't do.
Nice job if you can get it.
Not really.
Human beings have an incredible aptitude at locking themselves into their own thought processes and defining their own reality.
Having a chatbot companion that can encourage such introversion can be unbelievably damaging.
You want to have a conversation with your late companion ? By all means, but do it in your own head. Constructed from memories, it will have vastly more meaning.
But you still need to come to terms with the fact that they're gone. I know it's hard, but you need to realize that.
So the guy brought a (smashed) colleague to her hotel room, ordered condoms and went to get them, left unused condoms in the room and left with a piece of her clothing, and the investigation stops there.
I infer that the Chinese justice system has decided that it's her fault.
Now I have one question : is Alibaba going to re-hire this swine, or does "sexual misconduct" include "forcible indecency" ?
This is China, things might not be what they seem.
Not long ago I read an El Reg forum post from someone saying that, from 1985 to 1992, he only had to patch once.
Sure, in those days, to hack a computer you had to be sitting in front of it.
Since then, this thing called The Internet has grown from a university project to the basic global international communications network that permeates our very lives. There isn't a single electronic device on sale today that doesn't want to connect to it. Hell, they're even making "connected cars", as if a driver needed more distractions from actually driving.
In this kind of environment, patching should be a regular part of a business' procedures. And the sysadmin's job is to determine which patches should apply, not whether or not something should be patched.
Dear me, just how much paperwork has been slashed to get to that ratio ?
Doesn't that kind of mean that the paper process was not very efficient ?
I understand that a paper process in three steps could go from a day to an hour (or even 15 minutes), but if it used to take 5 days and now takes only 5 minutes, some kind of corners must have been cut.
In the best-case scenario, of course, it means that they have successfully streamlined the overall process.
In that case, congratulations.
As far as I can tell, a forwarded message is a new message.
Entirely new, with content copied from a given message, of course, but there is otherwise no link to the original message that has been forwarded.
So receiving an encrypted message that only you can read is one thing. Forwarding that message to someone else creates a new message with a different encryption value to the new recipient.
If the writer of the original message somehow gets a copy of the forwarded message, he should not be able to read it because he is not the recipient.
Unless, obviously, the recipient of the forwarded message forwards it to him.
Am I being clear ?
It's worse than that. The HR department cannot possibly assess what they don't know, and the only thing they do know is how to file CVs and personnel records.
You think an HR drone knows anything about programming ? Or automotive engineering ?
They don't. So they are given bullet points to check off, and it's a damn sight easier to check [Computer Science Degree] than it is to actually ask the years of experience, the successes and failures, and get a general idea of the actual competence of the candidate.
HR is basically the last place you want to go to evaluate a candidate. Get one of the experienced people who actually work in the department and know exactly the profile they need, bring him/her in to evaluate the candidate and you'll have a much better indicator of if or not that person can fill the position.
I've been saying since the first El Reg article that massive tax rebates were part of the deal.
Not that it was so difficult to guess.
I checked Taylor out on Google Earth. Not a river in sight for 200km around (the circle ruler is a great tool).
Great place to build a monster chip-making plant that is going to need millions of gallons of water every day.
I actually hope that they do build that plant. It'll be fun hearing about how it's only working at 25% capacity because of drought.
It'll also be fun hearing about the massive layoffs due to inactivity (well, not for those laid off, obviously).
And the best fun will be to hear about how the local council defends their choice in the middle of the disaster that they are bringing upon themselves.
Because whatever happens and however well that plant does run, one thing is certain : in 30 years, Samsung is shutting it down.
And after 30 years, they'll have a gold-plated excuse : it's obsolete and too expensive to upgrade.
"You just need to identify which bits of the filesystem and registry they are trying to write to and adjust permissions as required "
Well yeah, sure, everyone knows how to do that, right ? What's the problem ?
</sarc>
The problem is that the vast majority of PC users are people who's job is not sysadmin, and their priorities are elsewhere. To them, the PC is a tool, and they just want to be able to do what it is they want to do.
The Registry ? They might have heard the name, but they're not interested.
So Admin access because otherwise either they go crazy, or the poor helpdesk guy (be it family or professional) is tied up over the phone all the damn day long.
Stellar mechanics are the most awesome things that happen in this Universe - or at least, the most energetic.
To think of a supergiant star having a black hole ingest it from the inside. The mechanics of that must be simply insane. The fact that it all ends in a supernova is frankly not surprising. The fact that it expels trillions of times the sun's energy is just a testament to how the Universe can go beyond everything we think we know.
Space is awesome.
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