Posts by Pascal Monett 19020 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
You want to improve the mobile web experience ? Great idea, as long as you do it for people using a phone.
I do believe it is possible to make the distinction between a phone user and a PC user, and orient the browser to the proper site. Given that the guys coding the UI are very likely not doing so on their phones, I would have thought that they would see an interest in keeping those things separate.
"Last week, the department finally admitted that it was scrapping those initial plans because the software developed didn't work as they'd hoped. "
Wrong, the software worked exactly as it had been specced. It was the specs that did not conform to the masturbatory declarations of the idiots in charge, but that is hardly surprising when said idiots had no idea of what they were approving vs what the tech would actually do.
I'm pretty sure someone tried to explain, but two minutes into the training course and the non-techies were all glazy-eyed drooling corpses that only got revived when they were sat at a dinner table in a restaurant with a glass of wine in hand.
Look, I appreciate that they told these miscreants to get stuffed, but how's about having proper security in the first place ?
Why is it that all these consulting firms with critical data seem to find the way to install "advanced tools" to magically solve their incompetence after the fact ?
How about installing those damn "advanced tools" before you get hacked ?
And what exactly are those "advanced tools" ? A firewall ?
Bitdefender Total Security 2020 is not totally secure. Ironic.
Of course, from a marketing point of view, you couldn't call it Bitdefender Best Security Effort 2020. You are either Total, or you don't even exist.
Well, at least they corrected the problem when notified, not like some others on the market, eh, IBM ?
Now that is impressive mismanagement.
I wonder how it got to that point, and why the existing board hadn't been sacked last year (or the point at which 50%, or €13bn, had been erased from stock value).
When you have stock, you have investors and, if I was an investor in that company, I would be screaming bloody murder after having half of my investment vanish in thin air.
No it is not. It is supposed to be a tool that allows me to run the programs I need, when I need to.
But now, Borkzilla has taken control. Borkzilla decides, and you can just meekly click Accept and bend over to Borkzilla's wishes.
Yes, updates are indeed important, but the day's work is no less important and, until the day Borkzilla can guarantee that an update is not going to brick the "service", Borkzilla should wait for the user to have time to start updating. Like, for example, at 5:30 P.M., just before leaving. So stop bothering us at 10 in the morning with an impending update when we don't have the time for that shit at that time of day.
It seems like a very good compromise, but I have no idea of the tech stuff behind it or how it could be subverted. On the face of it, it does seem good.
I guess I'll wait for UK Gov's reaction. If they don't like it, it's likely that it is because they can't use it to further the surveillance state they are desperately trying to push forth - which would mean that it is indeed a good solution.
No way that could go wrong. Nobody will be able to take control of the phone with malware and have some fun, like by flying the drone into the mast.
I do hope that the communications between the phone and the drone are encrypted. They are, right ? Right ?
Oh who am I kidding, the guy who wrote that app hasn't even looked at an encryption framework, let alone implemented it.
Satan and Beelzebub are going hand in hand. I'm not quite sure I'm reassured by this turn of events.
Meanwhile, Borkzilla's latest update installs Edge as default browser even if you had Chrome before. I wonder how long it's going to take Google to tap Borkzilla on the shoulder and say "knock it off" ?
Officer, you can't ticket me, the cost of that ticket compared to my paltry revenue is enormous.
Inspector, you can't arrest me, the cost of losing my freedom is enormous.
Your Honor, you can't put me in jail, the cost of losing my illegal drug cartel is enormous.
. . .
Man, the ways that argument could be used is dizzying.
Your understanding of our Universe is quite obviously much higher than that of the thousands of PhD-level experts in the field.
Would you mind sharing your universal theory of physics with us ? You know, the one that binds quantum physics and the Standard Model that all the experts you are better than have been looking for since Einstein revealed that little problem ?
With your vastly superior knowledge and understanding I'm sure you have already solved that on a napkin somewhere. Please share.
</sarcasm>
It seems curious to me that our best minds are desperately trying to detect our level of technology on other planets.
That wavelength is where you would see sunlight reflected off of our solar panels. What right do you have to decide that an alien civilization is using the same solar panel tech ? They might have room-temperature superconducting solar panels that don't reflect anything at all and are 100% efficient.
You won't detect that.
And what forecast does Canalys has as to how many will end up in landfills, polluting our water aquifers ?
Any idea on that ?
The entire wireless earbud sector is just electronic waste, especially if the batteries are not replaceable and, if I'm not mistaken, they generally aren't.
This entire market is an affront to everything that ecology stands for.
The only time clutching a clipboard is acceptable in when you're a doctor in a hospital reviewing patient details, or if you're a construction site manager checking the progress on how the construction is working.
A clipboard is not part of an IT manager's work tools. The fact that he had one, and that he brought some underlings to a discussion where they had absolutely nothing to do, is the hallmark of the office weenie who's in over his head and just trying to impress.
Well he impressed all right. What incompetence.
I like the idea of an environmentally-friendly, well-supported phone.
Unfortunately, I just checked their website and the latest model is €450. That is way outside the budget I will allocate to a phone.
So I'll just continue with my current Galaxy A3 as long as possible, and hopefully I won't have to replace it until I retire, at which point at get myself a basic feature phone that allows you to phone and has a battery that lasts a month.
It's all I will need anyway.
. . that an 8TB disk still has more bandwidth than an average Internet connection.
I'm guessing that a 1GBps fiber line would work better, but that is far from being the general case in the USA, so fill up a snowcone and ship the box back so AWS can transfer it to your instance is what this is about.
Not a bad idea.
You go to The Cloud (TM), obviously. But then you're not in the business of providing critical data to many other companies.
Once upon a time, businesses would look at your small company and say "Work with them for my critical data ? I don't think so."
Today, The Cloud (TM) allows your small company to cheat with its abilities to reliably provide said critical data - until The Cloud (TM) falls over (again).
Well maybe you should have used your own server if it is so important.
But no, you followed the siren song of The Cloud (TM) and now you're learning that all those assurances and contract terms are worth less than the paper they were written on.
One day, people will learn that, if your data is mission-critical, you put the money on the table and hire the competence to ensure that it stays up, you don't go hiring Someone Else's Server thinking you're covered.
Because you're obviously not covered as well as you think.
"businesses moving to Slack/Teams/Hangouts/etc"
That's fine for internal communication, I guess, but I don't think you'll find IBM sharing Teams with Apple any time soon.
Between companies, you still need regular old email.
And as for individuals, God preserve me from a day where I have to have a FaceBook account to send my daughter or my wife something. I don't see how giving my life up to that slimeball is better than email.
As usual, mouthpieces blabbering on current trends while completely ignoring how conditions have changed.
I've always been interested in working from home, that's not new. Since the beginning of office work, in IT or otherwise, the norm has always been you go to the office and work at a desk, with your colleagues. Over time, the Internet was born, then VPNs, and sometimes you could work for a boss who didn't break out in hives when you suggested that you could do part of your job from home.
Today however, companies have been brutally pushed into a world where everybody is working from home, and whether or not they broke out in hives, bosses have found that, yes, their company can actually function like that (for those companies that could do so, obviously).
That is a sea change in that now, bosses can no longer break out in hives when you say that you can do that from home. You did it before and it worked out fine. So now we can envision a world where you'll be at the office for meetings, for greeting certain customers or consultants, and work from home the rest of the time.
We'll all see how this works out, but nobody is going to have "works from home" in their contract. It will likely remain a possibility, apparently big companies are seriously planning it, but we will all have days at the office again.
The fact that fake card numbers exist and can be used points to a lack of security on the part of banks. In Luxembourg, it is not enough to have a credit card for online transactions anymore. I have a USB-like token that, on the press of a button, gives me a 6-digit PIN code that I have to enter to validate my purchase.
If banks all over the world adopted that level of functionality, the fake card issue would disappear by itself.
That is the kind of support you get from small companies who need to make a place for themselves on the market. They care about their customers because they don't have four continents of them.
The more customers a company gets, the more rigid the support structure, until you get to Borkzilla where the support structure has gone the same way as quality assurance : it's the beta testers - sorry, the Dev Channel - that take up that role now.
Apps are what make a platform, and where mobes are concerned, it is what makes them more attractive than the competition.
Apple is imposing a luxury tax on developers when they are the ones who bring value to the entire Apple ecosystem. What have I just read about HTC ? It has crap apps. Doesn't make me feel like buying a phone from them.
As far as apps are concerned, Apple is just a facilitator. Yes, it provides the App Store, but don't try to make me believe that that is costing Apple $100Bn/year.
The normal fee of an intermediary is 10%. That is what Apple should have the right to ask for.
Well they would, wouldn't they ? Except for the fact that, apparently, 80% of the current workforce is Indian of Indian origin. That strikes me as a bit curious in a country that is an ocean away from India.
Until, of course, I checked out the Management page of Infosys' website. All Indians.
So yeah, they're bringing over Indians. It's pretty obvious.
I am curious to how that will work out. I don't think there are that many embassies that have enough space for a bit barn, and I'm certain that embassy staff do not have the qualifications to run one. So that would mean external (foreign) consultants coming in regularly to manage servers that may contain sensitive data.
Doesn't sound ideal from a security standpoint.
It is insane to imagine that Borkzilla would make a mail client these days and choose not to include protocols that have been used since the dawn of email. It's not like POP3 and IMAP are nebulous, abstract things you need an engineering degree to grasp. Who signed off on this nonsense ?
And, as for the new UI to come, I wouldn't put too much stock in it. We're talking about the company that made Metro, remember ?
Limited by what ?
Up to now, it's been sold and installed at many places. Until these days, the only thing limiting FR was budget and how paranoid the person in charge was.
And don't forget that all these companies working on FR are just halting selling to cops in the US. None of them are limiting sales outside the US.
I'm pretty sure FR will be installed somewhere in 2020, just not under US police authority.
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