Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
0.5% of what ? A billion emails ? Ten thousand emails ? Of the average amount of emails opened every day ?
And how does Mozilla know if I'm opening an email without the telemetry to tell it ?
That sub annoys me on more than one level.
Sure they will, they'll have the components made in Taiwan in a jiffy !
Seriously though, this is a golden snouts-in-the-trough call for a company to create the required installations in the US, jack up the price tenfold and get the lucrative government contract because Made in America.
Oh, in order to maximize the margins they will, of course, hire cheap Chinese labor, but the management will be lily white all the way, so it'll be all good.
Google says that Meena is "built to have convincing chinwags with its human handlers", but it also says that "humans interacting with these systems have to do so in a rigid manner".
Well that is all sens of reality gone out the window. If I'm chatting with a friend, the interaction will have no rigidity at all. The manner will be relaxed, jpyful and possibly all over the place, but rigid it will not be.
“On Earth, we can predict if it is going to rain pretty much anywhere in the world very accurately"
Really ? Please give me a web site where I can get that level of accuracy. Unless your accuracy is : on Earth, because my weather reports have trouble telling me which day it's going to rain. I can't count the number of times I check the weather site the day before, and am told rain, and then I check the weather the next morning and I'm told overcast.
I'm sorry, but if your forecast is only good for two hours, you haven't forecast anything.
America warned everyone, and told nobody why exactly it could say that. In return, anyone with a brain did his own evaluation and found that America is frothing at the mouth and can no longer be trusted.
How much longer are we going to have to endure this fax-simile of diplomacy ? America is not warning anyone, it is simply trying to keep the market to itself.
And failing dismally, as it should.
What is this ostrich reflex that companies seem to adopt more and more ? If your product has an issue, shutting down your website doesn't really make things look better.
Yes, I understand, having to admit that everything is borked is not fun. You're a company. Have some balls. Own up to the problem. People really do prefer a company that admits its faults and works hard to resolve them, rather than a company acting like a kid who disappears when the pitcher of milk lays shattered on the kitchen floor.
That Ubiquiti made that decision in the current climate tells volumes about how much they care about their users' opinions (they don't).
I think that that decision will come back to bite them, because awareness is growing on this issue. Companies that just Trump around with their own promises are going to find that the market will react more and more.
And that is a Good Thing (TM).
That's called the Kessler Syndrome, depicted by the 2013 movie Gravity, which I really enjoyed.
Who knows ? Maybe tonight is when it will actually happen ?
If Microsoft made Windows 7 open source it would end its OS revenue stream then and there. The amount of developers that would flock to get DirectX code and port that to Linux, tweak the sources to get rid of the bloat and streamline the whole thing would be simply dizzying.
Microsoft simply cannot open source its OS. It has way too many technologies in there that it still uses and needs, and open-sourcing the OS without those technologies would be handing out an empty husk.
In spite of all the angst around the Windows UI, it's what's inside that really counts. And Microsoft is counting on that too, so proprietary it will stay.
A distant reality ? For the moment, it is totally science-fiction and honestly, I have to wonder if we will ever be smart enough to create industrially something that is actually intelligent. We are still learning how the brain works. We took twelve years to map the pitifully small 25 thousand neurons of a fly's brain, and it cost $40 million to get that result.
We are very far from understanding the most complex organ in our bodies and, as long as we don't, I fail to see how we will be able to create anything that is intelligent based on our technology. Frankenstein was a nice story, but there is no lightning bolt that will give life to a semiconductor. Artificial Intelligence, the real stuff, is not even on the drawing board for now.
Choosing a non-US network component supplier is "rejecting the cause of freedom" ?
I have breaking news for you, my dear : The USA no longer represents Freedom. Not with the NSA pilfering communications all over the world without any right to do so, and certainly not with a government that does not hesitate to separate children from their parents under specious border rules.
Besides, for a country that is so free market-oriented, you are especially badly placed to complain when the market doesn't choose you.
Sorry, no. I'm not going back to the days of checking the forums and search engines to find out which new MS patch I had to block or uninstall in a hurry to keep my 7 desktop my own and not get effing ads for 1 0 that I had no intention of installing, free or not.
Windows 1 0 is the eternal changeling, and MS has locked things down so that you cannot actually refuse to update anymore. And there's the ads. I don't care what solution you think you have now, it will work until Redmond's eye falls on it and zaps it with another update.
I'm not climbing on that treadmill for a million dollars. 7 is my last MS OS and that is final.
Besides, MS is transitioning to Linux, so I'll just wait for games to work and the transition to the penguin side shall be complete.
Surprise ? For who ?
They provided a free service that required non-negligible installation costs, hardware maintenance and a fleet of support vehicles and personnel.
And they got no revenue out of it, except for dubious ad-related stuff.
The only surprise is that this firm didn't get created in the dot-com bubble along with all the other stupid ideas that placed revenue last on the list of requirements.
Brand new, SAP-compatible hardware and the issue is done with. SAP doesn't run on special SAP PCs, now does it ?
Really, everything about SAP screams lock-in and expensive. On top of that, you have administrative muppets to manage the thing. They signed a contract in 2011 and nobody bothered to wonder about the hardware's end-of-life and what solutions were possible ?
This was not an unforeseeable problem. Somebody should have been paying attention, but no, back in 2011 it was Bonus Time, Yee-HAW !
Now you have paid millions for an ERP solution, and you're going to pay millions more for the same thing (but, in The Cloud !) because you couldn't be arsed to actually manage things.
Oh well, that how the market survives, with idiots paying the same thing several times over. On public money. No biggie.
Why is it that every new tech is automatically used as another excuse for flinging my data about to points I do not control and want nothing to do with ?
How is it that a slightly better memory tech means my local phone will suddenly stop processing anything ?
Stop it. So you might have a better version of RAM, fine. It's still RAM, and it will not change a thing as far as data processing is concerned. It will most certainly not create a world where everything millions of users do on their phones will be sent to a central computer (can we say mainframe again ?) for processing and the result sent back.
I'm sure IBM would like that, but no, not gonna happen.
It requires sustained political will, which is something hardly any country has these days.
Space exploration will go forth with private companies, helmed by billionaires, because they are the only forces left that have the vision and the willpower to get things done.
I personally doubt that NASA alone, on public funding, will ever get it done. NASA will be part of the trip, no doubt, but it is losing its position as leader. The question is, which billionaire is going to take point ?
Do not confuse the fact that tens of thousands of developers have desperately tried to make something that works and is useful under Windows with any technical superiority. Linux is demonstrably superior to Windows and you only have to look at Azure and the fact that its networking is managed by Linux boxes to realize that.
Yes. Microsoft uses Linux to manage Azure. Let that sink in.
You know what "the days of paper tape and teletypes" had ? Reliability. That is what Linux has, and that is what Windows will never have. One day, businesses will wake up to that fact, when the new generation that has not been brought up on Windows comes of age and starts managing things.
How is it that the entire board of ICANN has not been arrested for blatant and repeated breach of trust ?
I really would like someone to explain to me how an organization with a government mandate can just act any way it wants and suffer no repercussion.
If I had the power, I would just line them up against the wall and have them all shot.
Innovation ? What innovation ? A charger is a hunk of components that have one job : dividing wall outlet power into what the device requires. The biggest innovation that chargers have ever had is the possibility of modifying the power output. That's it, and it's been done already and you, Apple, did not do it.
And besides, you can go and "innovate" the charger if you like, we're not preventing you from doing that. What we want is one kind of power plug and the ability to use the same charger on multiple devices. THAT is innovation - the kind that is useful for the user. You know ? Those nebulous entities that pay you money for your overpriced tat ? Money that you are happy to put forward on your balance sheet and show to shareholders ? Yeah, those things.
Agreed. I got lucky last week ; I had a 5-day contract in a university and, upon arriving the first day, I found out that they had reserved an actual office for me, and I was alone in it ! In my 25-year career this must have been the first time I've had an office to me and me alone !
Needless to say, I agreed to everything they asked of me and did my absolute best to solve their problem.
It is a well known fact that IBM is having some issues with employees at the moment, and has been for some time.
On the other hand, Scottish Power signed a 10-year contract to have someone else manage its IT ? Where's the rationale in that ? Frankly, this whole outsourcing thing is getting out of hand. You bring in a consultant or two if you do not have the expertise to handle something, but once you've identified the need, you hire the expertise or train somebody you have.
Signing up to pay someone else to take of things for ten years at a time is a waste of money and resources, plain and simple.
Is a marriage not made in Heaven. So, another wreck along the IT highway. What's betting that we'll have IBM on one side, with all the documentation needed to prove that they respected the specifications and were forced by the client to do a lot of additional work, and Co-Op on the other side with a hodepodge of contradicting emails and some meeting minutes where they will try to prove that IBM was playing fast and loose with the definitions of the specifications ?
Let the mudballs fly and we'll see where they land.
Looks like he had himself a nice little bonus-maker. He was smart enough to glean info and serve it up, but dumb enough to do it on corporate email and his own bank account.
Well, he's going to have a lot of time to think about burner phones, anonymous bank accounts and the like. Too bad he'll never get the chance to improve while working the fryer during the night shift.
Yes, I know about retraining costs and all the rest.
But once they've retrained everyone, no more problems and no more surprises. Oh, for sure, manglement is going to spend some time without the pretty charts and snazzy presentations, but it's a small price to pay when you've excised the Microsoft Tax from your budgets, is it not ?
And you would replace email with what ? Facebook postings ? Twitter notifications ? An SMS, maybe ?
Email is still very useful, especially in a business environment.
Obviously, for those who spend their free time on social media, yeah, not so useful. It's okay though, nothing they do there is useful either.
Those are words that have never, ever been used to described the ad experience on a computer.
None of those words have anything to do with ads on an electronic device, and likely they never will.
Ads are a nuisance, a malware vector and totally useless. You can slurp all the data you want, you can hoover all the info you get your hands on, you will never realize that when I've just bought a UPS, seeing ads for a UPS just makes me want to strangle you. Get your finger out and code your ad pseudo-AI to note the date of my purchase and start showing me ads on that when the expected lifetime of the object is about to be reached. THEN you will be relevant.
Of course, by that time your marketing manager will have long been changed, so no impact on his bonus. Well he's not getting one now, now is he ?
We need to nuke the whole ad system and restart from scratch. Start by taking all ad agencies and shooting the lot of them. That will clear the ground to do something useful.
I never did understand that move. If you want people to use your language, you have to give them the interface to learn it. The fact that MS made Visual Studio not a free package is just another gun->foot moment in my mind.
Traditionally, all programming environments have been free. Turbo Pascal didn't make you pay for its dev environment, nor did Borland ever do that. They understood that you need to incite people to come and discover, and if you set a price for entry, it just becomes a barrier that only those who have to pay will do so.
So it's no use complaining that people aren't using your language, Microsoft. You're the one who is keeping them out, for the sake of a few more bucks to throw on your bottomless pile.
What a sad life she has. I wonder if she went off the rails, or if she never was on them and found Alan's life appealing/attractive and used that to build her own.
In any case, unfortunately for her, his things will obviously be returned to their rightful place. It just might be a good idea to post a full-time guard because she seems quite capable of going and stealing them again.
Now that is a valid concern, as well as an acceptable reason to not implement total encryption. The Helldesk is hard enough as it is, and the idiots who lock themselves out of their pics would likely be the first to blame Apple for it.
That said, it's obvious that authorities are back to the "think of the children" angle. They must have a rotating wheel with Terrorist, Pedophile, Mass Murderer and Evil Thug, and at the beginning of the month they spin it to know what angle to use on the public. This month we've been getting Pedophile, last month was, I think, Terrorist.
Anything to keep them awash in private data without a warrant.
"would violate ICANN's commitment to ‘preserve and enhance ... the operational stability, reliability, security ... and openness of the DNS and the Internet"
If that is the case, then what is the penalty ?
Let's be clear : ICANN is a rogue organization now. It does what it wants to best serve its own interests, and its charter is pretty much a charred lump of ashes in the furnace. If there is not a clear and imminent danger facing its Board and directors, nothing is going to change.
It just blows my mind that an organization chartered by the Government to do a specific thing in a specific way can just completely ignore its duties and do whatever it wants without the police marching in to round up those responsible, throw them in jail for treason and have the Government set up new management.
Why is that not happening ? WHY ?
Well that certainly is a successful lawsuit.
I personally don't care for Ubisoft games in general, but you have to be a special kind of loser to want to actively hurt the play experience of people you don't know and will never meet. These four don't care about that, they're in it for the money, which is just evil. I hope they go down for the count.
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