Posts by Pascal Monett 19394 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
And we've learned lots of things through lots of errors and surprises, but I think the one bit of email functionality that has to have caused the most trouble is the out of office auto-reply.
It is rather useful, generally speaking, but it can still cause havoc even now. Thankfully, email servers have been taught to not auto-reply to auto-replies.
I think the idea is more on the line of the "AI" should not disregard any effort in diagnosing possible sickness just because the patient belongs to a particular subset of the human race.
So, basically, "AI" should treat everyone equally and work just hard for each case it is presented with.
Which is an obvious requirement. That said, certain populations may be more at risk of certain types of disease. It might not be that easy to ensure that the AI is not going to neglect any possible signs in populations that are not as much at risk of a specific disease if the markers are present.
I believe it has been proven that Apple (among many others) has survived perfectly well with 99% of its staff working from home for around an entire year.
Now you pretend that 2 weeks is the acceptable maximum ?
Are you crazy ?
Stupid question. From a company with its own concealed-weapon-carrying police force that allows itself to raid its employees' homes, of course you are.
Still, 2 weeks is not going to cut the mustard.
You need to think different (don't know where I heard that).
Your problem is that you're a bunch of numbnuts with a slavery-era mentality that missed the fact that we are now in the 3rd Millennium and racism is no longer kosher.
Not to worry though, with your grip on reality I'm sure you'll get around to understanding things by the 4th Millenniium.
Google is desperately trying to find some way to make us believe that its use of cookies is good for us, when it is actually only good for Google's ad business.
I don't care what Google proposes. Whatever it is is only destined to keep the money flowing in and our privacy being sold out.
Okay, I'm really sorry to rain on anything that NASA has going, but we need to remember two things about this 'thinking while driving' thing :
1) Perseverance is driving at 3.33 cm/second - not exactly breakneck speed
2) there are no intersections on Mars, or stop signs, or school crossings, or basically any other unexpected event in any way possible
So no, Perseverance-style 'thinking while driving' is not going to be of much use on our Blue Planet.
Not unless we institute a global speed limit of "oh God I'd be better off walking".
Can we stop with that obsession ?
I know science-fiction films want us to have holographic phones and tablets springing up from a wristband, but we've already reached the point where your phone in your back pocket will snap if you forget to take it out before you sit down.
We have reached peak thinness.
It is time we get back to something that you can actually hold onto without fear of the screen snapping.
Oh, and we need to get back to having repaceable batteries, Apple be damned.
At the time, I remember very well the number of comments wondering whether or not these COVID tracking apps would be perverted like that, and then Singapore went and did exactly that.
Suprisingly, nobody else did, until now, that is, with Australia opening the way again.
There is clearly a problem in our so-called Western society. On the one hand, everyone is all about Freedom (and, increasingly, Privacy), on the other hand we are sliding slowly but surely into police states at a level Orwell would be amazed of.
Democracy is hard enough to keep going as it is. Let's keep the jackboots at bay.
Okay, I am well aware that large companies do have the despicable habit of being run by the beancounters, but in this case shouldn't it be the CTO getting the flack ?
IBM does have a CTO, right ? If he can't stand up for what is needed, isn't it his fault in the first place ?
Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi ? That's crazy. Kudos to the mad engineers who tried that.
That said, Windows hardware requirements have always been a joke. For starters, Borkzilla has systematically tried to make people believe that whatever version of Windows it was pushing, it could run fine on a quarter of the actual memory requirements.
For Windows 95, the official minimum RAM was 4MB. If you actually wanted to do anything other than boot the system, you needed 16MB.
For Windows XP, the official minimum RAM was 64MB. Again, having at least 256MB made the system actually useful and responsive.
For Windows 7, Borkzilla had the gall to state that 2GB was all that was needed (for the 64-bit version). What you actually needed was 8GB at the bare minimum, 16GB was much, much better.
And for Windows 1 0, Borkzilla is still trying to convince people that 2GB for the 64-bit version is enough. If you want to look at the logon screen, maybe, but if you want to work, I'm pretty sure that 16GB is the bare minimum.
"people need to prioritize disabling the print spooler service on domain controllers and mission critical servers "
What the hell is the print spooler doing enabled on a domain controller ? Since when do you print from a domain controller ?
I wager this situation would never happen on a Linux server, because Linux admins only enable what is needed on the server. Windows admins, on the other hand, just install Windows and let it run.
I never print from my main PC, because the printer is on the other side of the office and the USB cord is not long enough. Do you really think I have the print spooler service enabled on my main PC ? Of course not.
They decided to give countries with the same score the same rank, so no, Estonia ranks 3rd because both the UK and Saudi Arabia rank 2nd.
Then you have Korea, Singapore and Spain that all rank 4th.
Once you understand the process, it becomes logical.
How would you rank the difference between the UK and Saudi Arabia given that they have the same score of 99.54 ?
Is there some sort of anathema around the words Middle East ?
Is it because the news has been referring to conflicts in the Middle East for the past fourty years (if not more) ?
Like it or not, it's the Middle East. Isreal is not part of Europe. It's not even guaranteed that the movements of tectonic plates will ever make that happen.
They are top notch for defining what happened in the past. If we have to wait on them to define how we need to manage social media now, we'll be dead before we get the report.
Social media has been here for a decade already. It's perfectly in academic timing to start worrying about it now.
The Maleficarum clearly did it for mainland Europe, but it was James Ist' book Daemonologie that kicked off the worst period of witch hunting in the UK.
The fact that it had been authored by a king, and not an obscure monk, had a lot to do with its influence.
I will never forget that time I accompanied a friend of mine to a presentation concerning an accounting package. He wanted me to come with him because, in the early 90s, I was an accountant.
At the presentation, there was the two of us, and two guys from an accounting company. Two young, cocky guys.
They spent the entire presentation asking about the the functionalities allowing them to trace employees down to the keystroke.
Remember, this was the early 90s, when the 486DX2 was the pinnacle of technology. And here I was, discovering that an accounting package was spending more CPU resources on spying on its users for the pleasure of management than actually doing its job of managing accounts.
That was one hell of an eye-opener for me.
My friend chose to not take that package.
"redress the balance caused by people accessing music, films, and other creative material online without paying for it directly "
Hey, I'm all for supporting the Arts, but why choose to tax the equipment ? If people are consuming creative material online, they're going somewhere for that, so tax that place.
Are we going to start hearing a variation on VHS killed the film industry ?
Stop this nonsense.
That has to be the least efficient Search module that has ever been invented.
I cannot help but imagine that Windows Search has been expressely tweaked by Borkzilla engineers to ensure that, despite every improvement in hardware performance, Windows Search remains just as sluggish as it was in Windows 3.1.
I disable that monstrosity, and use Everything Search instead. Everything Search is free, it installs in less than half a minute and, once it is done looking through your hard drives, it takes less than 10 milliseconds to find any file name you might be looking for.
You know, like a proper search function should do in the 3rd Millennium, with computers that are a million times more performant than they were when the 286 came out.
In France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany and, I'm guessing, all of the EU, banks allow you to transfer money to any IBAN account number.
You just log on to your online account portal and type in the order, confirm it and it's done.
It baffles me that there are so many people in the world who need ad-hoc services for something that should be offered by the banks themselves.
Time it took Twitter to ban Trump's lies : 4 years.
Time it took Twitter to ban another world leader who was just complaining about Twitter's non-compliance to local law : less than 4 days.
Hmm. Seems that Twitter has a rather unbalanced set of rules when it comes to managing world leader accounts.
As I read this article, the author is complaining that AMP redirects my click to a Google-cached page, and its successor does the same thing.
Except that I use ClearURLs. That is a Firefox addon that removes all extraneous, useless stuff from the link I want to click on.
So I have never been impacted by AMP. When I click on a link, ClearURLs ensures that I get to the page that was intended : the one on the website I wanted to visit, not Google's cached version of it.
The Internet remains the Internet. If you do a little bit of research, you can have the experience you want, not the experience other entities want for you.
Sorry Bob, but have you seen the sides of the roads and highways these last few decades ?
Plastic bags full of trash are lying there. Sometimes it's just a plastic bag, or an empty plastic bottle.
The truth is, people are pigs. They do not hesitate to throw away anything they decide they don't need any more, and many don't give a damn about where they are when they throw something away.
My favorite example ? Smokers. When they're done with their cigarette, that butt will go flying, be it on the sidewalk or through a car window. Look for a trash can ? Are you kidding me ?
So plastic has got into the oceans not through any government program, obviously, but through the sheer don't-give-a-damn of a large part of the population that goes to the beach and doesn't care what they leave behind when they decide to leave. Some might attempt to look for a trash can, but if it's more than 20 meters away, or if it's already overflowing, fuck it, they'll just leave their trash right there.
Now, obviously, I'm not saying everyone does that, nor am I saying that that is happening on every single road or beach of the world. It has happened enough, though, so that there are several areas in our oceans that are choking with plastic residue.
That would not have happened if everyone was mindful of putting their trash where it belongs : in the bin.
