Posts by Pascal Monett 19067 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Ouch. There are a million websites out there that need to review their Ts&Cs in that case.
First time I've ever heard of a judge knocking down those carefully constructed piles of legal Get Out Of Jail Free (for the company) mumbo-jumbo. If this becomes a precedent, a lot of companies are going to feel the pain.
Sometimes British judges are just the best.
Am I glad that I don't work in the kind of environment that thinks that self-hosting is anathema.
It may work for some, but I have been self-hosting my data for over two decades and I have had no problem. That does not incite me to indulge in handing over my data to some faceless virtual hosting facility.
All the stories I hear about burning datacenters, entire swaths of hosted servers wiped by some "event", and the many, many stories about pilfered user data really do not make me think "hey, I just might try out that cloud stuff everyone is talking about".
The advantage of the free software movement is that, once the basic list of requirements are set up, things can be added under public scrutiny and the software can evolve according to the needs of the users, not the budgets of the providers.
Free Software is the death knell of closed voting machines, whose controller nobody knows. It is the end of Windows (yeah, okay, not anytime soon, but still), an OS that is decided by a company that thinks it knows better than you what you need. At some point in time, it will even make IoT reliable and secure (not holding my breath either).
Closed, proprietary software is dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
Then it is perfectly logical that Borkzilla enters the field now, a decade after everyone else.
It's SOP, you see.
Astronomers have not waited on Borkzilla to wake up to their needs. This is just another soon-to-be-abandoned project.
For "economic and technical reasons," the service could not be provided by any organisation other than the original contractor before the expiry of the Horizon Agreement
Okay, sure, that part I can accept. It would be highly unreasonable to throw everything away and have operation grind to a halt while you commission Crapita (because who else ?) to develop an entirely new set of bugs.
So fine, ensure the maintenance of your buggy, mololithic, outdated system. Got it.
Meanwhile, now that you have ensured its continuance, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO REPLACE IT ? Now's the time. Throw another £100 million to somebody and get your non-monolithic, up-to-date, designed for multi-channel digital operations (do you really even know what that means ?), highly Agile system on its feet so that you can replace the dinosaur when the next end date expires.
Because 2024 is going to be here before you finish drawing up your next set of outdated specifications, I'll wager.
Sorry, but where you get it from does not make it any less privacy-respecting.
Unless you have a recent Huawei phone, you've got the Google Play Store and there's no other option to get stuff without rooting the phone, so it's hardly a dent in Mozilla's efforts to get you a privacy-respecting browser.
As was inevitable even in December. But don't owrry, governments are forcing people to get untested vaccines so, by next December, everyone will either be vaccinated or dead and everything will be business as usual.
Well, for the businesses and business owners that survived the confinements, that is.
Can we get a Reaper icon ?
And an Earth-based telescope allowed boffins to determine that it has talcum powder on the surface. The image quality, power and precision to establish that is simply staggering. Well done.
No so well done for the wiki page though, it doesn't mention the Subaru telescope at all.
Where do you draw that conclusion ?
I believe that there are quite a few highly-qualified physics experts that might not agree with you.
Of course, as always, please point me to your Nobel prize-winning PhD that demonstrates that everyone is wrong.
Oh, you're not done writing it ?
No Problem, we'll wait.
And yet industry keeps on doing it, eh Boeing ?
Honesty though, you can saddle a car with a lot of electronics before it starts getting weighed down. Do you really think the camera on your smartphone is the heaviest part ? Of course not.
And since cars these days have the processing capacity, well, would be a shame not to use it, I guess.
But not for phoning home. That is never acceptable.
Well, not an expert on encryption by a long shot, but before being able to send any kind of message, the proposal would have you provide proof of ID to the platform, so you can kiss anonymity good-bye.
Then there's the fact that setting up private encryption is a hassle not many people will wish to put up with, if we start by supposing that people will even be bothered to give it a thought.
The problem is power to the people - the bigwigs don't like that.
A union is something that is going to argue for better working conditions, less stress, longer bathroom breaks and so and so forth forever. That will make a dent in profitability, you see, so Bezos is doing his damndest to avoid that.
Like that is ever going to happen.
The Hoover Dam is the end of the chain. There is so much water being siphoned off the Colorado River it's pure insanity to build a semiconductor plant in one of the driest places on Earth.
For Heaven's sake, can't you go and build in Montana ? Or Washington State ? They've got water up there.
State subsidies won't help you maintain production when the draught comes along.
Sorry, but on my Synology DS414j I have five user profiles and none of them can do all the same things as any others.
Each profile has its level of access to the 8 partitions my NAS has, from no access to read access to write access. Not every profile can write on the same partitions.
It's very granular. I don't understand where Stoneshop is coming from. Of course, if two users have write access to a partition, they both have the same write access, but hey, what do you expect ?
If used water can be treated and returned to a drinkable state, then fab plants seriously need to think about a near-closed-circuit for their water needs.
If TSMC and Micron had planned ahead for draughts (which are not exactly unknown), they would have useable system that would allow them to function at full or near full capacity right now and draw less water from Earth's reserves every day.
I understand that it is economically costly, but to not do that is ecologically costly.
And then there's the problem of what they do with the resulting waste from the recycling center.
It's a mess any way you look at it.
They said the estimate was "off by an order of magnitude" - but they didn't say in which direction.
What I want to know is whether all this slurpage still takes place if mobile data is switched off.
What really irks me is that mobile data is expensive - all this slurpage is being done without my consent and on my dime.
Of course, in Signapore, it is indispensable to have more tech to ensure workers are traced, tagged and watched, with the Multiple Eyes of Sauron snitching on them to a local enforcer (an Uruk-Hai ?).
None of this is going to solve the materials or manpower crisis, a drone is not going to make materials come faster. But this is the right time to implement these measures, obviously.
But we'll never tell you how many. Nor will we tell you how many terrorist actions were stopped because of surveillance.
Don't worry your pretty little minds with such things, Citizen, just be good and cower in a corner while we "protect" you.
Oh, and John ? Sarah doesn't like the way you look at her. Just an FYI.
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