Posts by Pascal Monett 19191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
I'm sorry, how the hell can there be theological arguments about Brexit ? Brexit has nothing to do with religion, it is a secular matter.
CofE, Roman Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist is all about Jesus, the Bible, Thou Shalt Not Kill, Lie or Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife, etc.
Spiritual matters. Brexit is anything but spiritual.
Nonsense.
The only thing you need to do is not hook your internal code to someone else's code repository.
It's the cancer of today's attitude regarding the Internet : I'll just link that bit of code to my project, what's the worst that can happen ?
Well this.
Take that code inside, check it out and make sure it does what it says.
But of course, to do that you have be an actual programmer, not just a muppet stringing other people's work together.
The only advantage is hinted at in the article : surveillance.
There is no reason to create a "digital" currency. Our currency is already digital for the vast majority of transactions. The only little part that uses cash is when you go buy a baguette or a loaf of bread at the bakers.
It is exactly what they want to know. What we do with our cash. There is no other possible reason.
In Europe, money is digital. I use my VISA card for practically everything. I have no use for another currency of any kind, and I will buy my baguettes with a few pieces of real coin.
I see no reason to change that that will benefit me.
I've never signed an employment contract that had a clause that would prevent me from filing a complaint in court.
Obviously, an employee is expected to keep company secrets, but that only pertains to how the company functions and what it does with its data. It has nothing to do with how people are treated.
If you're treated badly, you have the right to complain to all and sundry, and if it's sexual harassment, take that bastard to court. The company should not be a shield for workplace harassment of any kind.
And that's not something that any study might have brought to light before starting building ?
No, this whole thing was one giant brown envelope for someone. No one in charge ever expected it to work, but it was a good excuse to shuffle some moolah here and there and make friends happy in the high circles.
What they are doing is just ensuring that Government can read and access everything. They don't give a flying frak that anyone else could do so. FaceBook is implementing end-to-end ecryption ? El Zuck uses Signal, not FaceBook chat.
When you specifically don't eat your own dogfood, that sends a very clear message.
Being there at the right time in the right place is the definition of success.
The fact that the job entails raking in the money and not doing anything meaningful is a perk.
Sure, I wouldn't mind that job. In the meantime, well, I take solace in the fact that I'm actually helping people.
It is extremely interesting to see that basically everyone except Google recognizes that targetted advertizing is an invasion of privacy and anything Google tries to get around that fact is just a lie.
Lobby money does not count when the rest of the industry is against you, and having WordPress against you is not a good sign.
Citation please ? Where are the numbers that support this conclusion ?
It's not because you finally patched two Department Of Defense servers that were waiting for that since 1995 that all of a sudden the numbers of victims have vastly decreased. And it's not because Microsoft and other vendors are publishing patches regularly that anything changes.
SolarWinds123 was not a patching problem, it was a bloody fucking stupid security problem that never should have happened in the first place.
Newsflash : they were pilots.
You need to update your knowledge of the Apollo program. All of the astronauts were test pilots and, before that, jet fighter pilots.
As for the computer, I don't know where you get the notion that it could have landed the module by itself. The Apollo Guidance Computer barely had RAM, and the little it had would not have made it able to land the module, not to mention judge a landing site. It was fine for interstellar trajectory control - which the crew of the Apollo 13 demonstrated they could do just as well.
"The Demand Management process will ensure that all work meets the needs and priorities of the Home Office in the most appropriate and efficient way to deliver value for money "
Yes, because UK Government IT projects have a stellar record for meeting needs and priorities.
Well, the needs and priorities of the snouts that have access to the trough, that is.
I trash my home system all the time. I fear nothing now. At least, not since I learned the true value of the word "backup".
It happened one day, way back when, and I was making a copy of my company mail file to my home system. It's just that I had forgotten that the file name was the same as my home mail. When faced with the "Do you want to replace" popup, I clicked on Yes, of course.
Then it dawned on me. I had just erased my home mail, with all my contacts and years of correspondence - including a response from Ian McKellen himself concerning a mail I had sent to him before LotR came out. I had emailed him to tell him how awesome I thought this was going to be, and he had nicely responded to me saying he was indeed thrilled about being in the film. Now that conversation is gone for all time.
That's the day the word "backup" became important to me.
What norm ?
I'm guessing the guys (because it was guys, of course) designing that recog "AI" have not yet lived long enough to observe that long, lucious hair is mainly the province of young, beautiful women. As women age, their hair gets shorter, and blonder (to hide the grey hairs). Very few men have long hair, but some do.
So having short hair has nothing to do with gender, especially nowadays.
Quite understandable. Young people fresh out of college with a student loan to pay back are likely to be grateful for the job and very unlikely to not do as they are told, even if what they are told makes no sense.
Old, experienced workers who know what they hell they're doing and how to do it are much less likely to be awed by a title telling them nonsense because they know how things work while the twat with title just knows how to give orders, never how to understand consequences.
No, you don't understand. IBM doesn't condone it, but it will discriminate every time it thinks it helps its bottom line.
Which is, increasingly, not all that often.
Not to worry. When IBM's beancounters come up with the figures and finally say "um, we think this behavior is detrimental to our benefits", then things will change.
Until then, go lawsuits !
Agreed.
The Hubble Deep Field survey proved that there is not a pixel of our sky that does not have stars and galaxies by the thousands. Life is certainly out there, somewhere.
But to think that a species advanced enough to span the stars just happens upon us without giving a formal hello and instead lurking around and kidnapping hillbillies for secret rectal experiments is ludicrous.
Either they would present themselves, or they would stay the hell clear and put some cloaked satellite surveillance in place to find out when we got sufficiently evolved to receive an official alien diplomatic delegation.
Specifically tailored to put my privacy in Google's sandbox so it can continue to play with it.
I am not amused.
This whole hoopla is because targetted ads are an invasion of privacy, privacy concerns are on the rise, so Google, being the most interested party and having made all of its billions on targetted advertising, is desperate to find a way to continue to milk that particular cow.
GDPR is going to be our primary defense in this matter, but Google will certainly do its level best to find a way - any way - to keep the targetted ad revenue flowing, which means to keep invading our privacy.
My solution is to use Chrome only when I have to access a Google app, be it Maps, GMail or Translator. If I'm already on a Google site, I might as well use a Google product. The rest of my browsing is done with Firefox using NoScript and uBlock Origin, and you can bet your bottom dollar that neither Google nor FaceBook are authorized there.
From what I've been reading on the subject, water (the H2O kind) has a particular chemical property that makes it ideal for life. I don't remember if it's the fact that it can dissolve and mix stuff, or the fact that its abundance makes it a good target for researching planets with it, but water is just about as important as carbon.
There have been discussions about another element that could possibly combine some form of DNA, I think it was silica. Chemists and biologists are however not convinced that anything could actually evolve on that basis - if I'm not mistaken.
Nope. Not me.
I got out in 2009, following certain things that happened on the other side of the pond. I spent three years trying to get back in, following web training and writing hundreds of applications (on paper), nothing came of it. In the third year I told my wife that I was starting to feel like it would be easier to find customers than an employer. She agreed. So it started.
Now, I have been self-employed since 2012, and it's working out fine. COVID has actually improved my work status since I have customers and no longer need to slog the traffic jams on Luxembourg highways. Of course, it helps that I have FTTH, working over a 12mbps line would not be so easy.
So no, I have no reason at this point in time to want to have an employer, and I don't think that's going to change any time soon. I do want to be able to take my wife to the restaurant again, though. Can't wait for things to get back to some sort of normal.
That's when I got out.
I had been pressured into getting a LinkedIn profile by a company who employed me before 2010, I never liked it, but I did what I was told like a good little drone.
When I left the company, I kept the profile for a while. When Borkzilla borged it, that was the tipping point and I closed my account.
Never regretted it.
Yes way.
That almost happened right in front of me. I was working in the same office as an old lady who was the secretary of the manager. One fine she got a package, there floppies in it. It was obviously the first time she'd ever seen any.
She promptly opened one of her drawers and took a pair of scissors. I watched, confused, as she brought the scissors to the corner of one of the floppies.
I just had the time to snap out of it and jump up, saying "No No No !" rather loudly, my hand up and arm outstretched to enforce my point.
Initially she was a bit miffed, but she let me explain and the floppies were saved.
At the end of that contract, she actually thanked me for "helping" her. She was a nice person.
I'll never forget the day I was called in to a dairy storage unit. The vast building was cooled to -30C.
It was winter, 0°C outside, but the sun was shining bright. I wore my coat to go there, obviously. I spent about fifteen minutes in there to do an upgrade and chat a bit with the floor manager, show him what was new. I thought the cold wouldn't get to me. Boy was I wrong !
When I left the building, it felt like I was on a beach. I took off my coat and reveled in the fact that it felt fine.
Well, for about sixty seconds. Then I put my coat back on.
That was an experience in nature.
My philosophy as well. I will not hesitate to upgrade my desktop when I can see a clear performance benefit, but I'll be damned if I go buy a new phone simply because it's the new model.
When we bought our house back in 2017 I replaced all the light bulbs with LEDs (or got the electrician to do it for the kitchen, where the stuff was not so easy because specific model of lamps). That was a clear benefit and an economy in the long run, so I did not hesitate. I'm not going to go buy some stupid IoT connected shite now to put a buggy app on my phone just so I can control the lamp from a screen. I have legs, I can get to the switch.
Really ? Here : TURN IT OFF !!
I want an OS, not a circus. Stop trying to transform Windows into the most interesting thing on my PC. It's there to run the stuff I need, not to remind me that I'm using a Borkzilla product.
Why can't Borkzilla understand ? You need to make an OS channel and a bullshit channel. The OS channel should be stable, reliable, no nonsense. The bullshit channel can have whatever brainfart you can concieve of, and users can subscribe to it if they want.
That would make things a lot simpler.
Only the customers that didn't check the appropriate box.
OVH has a DR plan, there are a number of other datacenters over Europe. Anyone who had included a DR zone is not having any problem.
Of course, it's the many, many OVH customers who looked at the price of the option and decided it wasn't worth it who are now crying in the corner.
No sympathy from me.
I agree with you, but the problem is that any modification of Einstein's theory to "make it work" hits a wall somewhere that makes things worse.
I've been reading up on this for some time now and, from what I understand, astronomers are not happy about the situation either.
This is Science, with a very capital S. Very educated people are making an educated guess to help explain why galaxies are not flying apart which, from the data we have, is what they should apparently be doing. We don't know why, and this is the best hypothesis we've got for the moment.
This lecture from one of the greatest scientific minds in recent history should help : Feyneman on The Scientific Method,
I think that the inertia of the FCC on this matter was the largest contributing factor. Now that the FCC is helmed by someone who apparently wants to do the job properly, things are likely to move forward a lot faster. And that is a Good Thing (TM).
The future is much more rosy when the knuckleheads are no longer in charge of things.
The good old days. The dawn of the New Information Highway, with plenty of people who wanted to show off their skills and make sure that you could run Settlers 2 or Battlefield Vietnam without needing to have the disk in the optical reader.
Bless them. They made my gaming life easier - without depriving authors of their revenue. Yes, I still have my Settlers 2 install CD. And Battlefield Vietnam, and about 600 others. I even bought two Battlefield 2 games because I played it so much that my first gamedisk shattered in the player. So much for my right to a license - in a normal world, I would have sent the pieces back and got a new DVD - because I only have license, right ? My license does not expire with the death of the disk.
So yeah, warez used to be good, until the crooks understood that they could distribute their version of a CD/DVD crack and include a nasty little package with it. It really didn't take all that long for the despicables to catch on.
Nowadays, warez is synonymous with malware. Thankfully, games no longer need to have a bloody plastic disc in a reader. Unfortunately, they do need to phone home every few minutes.
Progress ?
MS Office works offline - at least, the versions before 365 did.
You can perfectly install MS Office 2016 and then unplug your computer from the Internet. That being said, I seriously doubt anyone posting in forums has disconnected his work PC from the Internet. If you're using Office, you're not just using Excel to do your monthly bank balance.
