Posts by Pascal Monett 18920 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Apple is a specialist in observing what works around its ecosystem, adopting the key functionalities into one of its own apps, and then throwing out the "copiers" because they're doing the same thing.
The only difference is that, this time apparently, they tried that on a company that has the money to take it to court, instead of some lone developer they could shit on without retaliation.
I'll be interested in reading about this case.
Trump has been pushing China and trying to get people to think that he is punishing China.
The only real effect is that China is gearing up to be self-sufficient. It's going to happen, and when it does, the USA is going to learn just what it means to not have a practical, pliable industrial base for creating all the shit it consumes year after year.
Because if making stuff for the USA becomes an optional activity for Chinese companies, the US is going to actually have to learn to make stuff for itself again. With all the pricing effects that is going to have.
And I can't wait for that to happen. We need to learn to pay the just price for the things we want. That will encourage us to really think about what we want. And that will put a brake on plundering the riches of our planet while throwing them away at the same time.
Well, I hope so anyway.
Well, I'm just guessing - and I'm probably reaching a bit - but I think it might be because the US government isn't really bothered with ensuring that Native Americans are educated to the point of being able to get a degree. In anything.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong, though.
Yes, and he has since died. The Chinese government has also expressed its displeasure on how that was handled, is now treating that man as a hero of the nation, and has forced the police to offer their apologies to the grieving family, leading to disciplinary action against one or more police officers involved.
And how the heck do you install more memory without powering down the whole thing first ?
It's nonsense to think that the server would be installed with maximum physical memory, then configured not to use it all. If a server needs more memory, you need to physically get the DRAMs to the server and slot them in. How can you possibly add memory without doing that ?
And sure, I get that these are virtualized servers, but the physical box they run on still has to have the memory needed in order to increase the amount allocated to that cache server. I'm guessing we're not talking about 4GB here, but much more than that.
Yes, what of it ?
Where is the proof that there is anything to be controversial about ?
The only controversy about Huawei is why the US Government is harping on about it without ever bringing any concrete evidence to the table. And you can fuck right off about national security concerns. Huawei equipment is publicly available, anyone can snap a pic of a suspicious motherboard, yet no one has.
This bullshit has been going on for longer than I care to remember, and I'm sick of it.
So, on top of all the functionality that that little wristwatch-sized thingy already has, they've added a built-in GPS receiver. And they can log the data for a certain amount of time.
My, my. Technology really can do wonderful things.
I wonder how much energy a GPS receiver uses ?
Agreed. I read that and noted that nowhere, in the list of entities that concern Amazon, nowhere are "employees" mentioned.
It is blindingly obvious that unions are not in the best interest of shareholders or associates. The interest of customers is not so clearly defined and seems to have been added to the list purely for numbering points.
In any case, the only people who do indeed have interest in unions are the employees, because they have no other way to voice grievances with a chance of getting a positive result.
So we now know that there are indeed intermediate-mass black holes, which we did not know before. Since we didn't know that, we could not factor their mass in our calculations for the amount of normal matter that exists in the Universe, which means our ratio of dark matter to normal matter is wrong.
Of course, we still don't know how much mass is harbored inside those things, and evaluating that is not going to be easy.
Add to that the fact that brown dwarfs are also an unknown quantity and it seems to me that there is significantly more normal matter than we initially thought. Probably not enough to do away with dark matter, but likely more than the 15% it is apparently currently pegged at.
Their future is indeed dark. If I'm not mistaken, even in good times they're not rolling in dough and, right, now, they are cursed and avoided at all costs.
I hope the people who make their living in that market manage to pull through.
That said, concerts are not going to disappear any time soon, so they have a chance, I think, at survival.
I don't see how Human culture is restricted by copyright. You have the right to read the book. The author has the right to be paid for writing the book. Where is the problem ?
Oh, you mean that the plagiarists cannot use someone else's idea ? And what are they adding if they just use someone else's idea ?
Of course, saying that, I remember that Science-Fiction would be much poorer if our greatest authors had not liberally plundered each others ideas and built on them.
Hmm. It looks like this is more complicated than I thought.
But let's make one thing clear : life + 70 is only because of Disney, which is especially ironic when you think that Disney pushed that to defend it's hold on Mickey which we haven't seen in 50 years.
It is high time copyright gets revised to something more reasonable : lifetime + 5 years, for example.
And it has to be the lifetime of a human being, not a company.
Once again, Ms Stob demonstrates an iron grip on the true issues that beset us, to illuminate our minds with the understanding of the processes that grind finely to control our lives, while peppering the text with delicious jabs at chosen targets.
Donald d'Orange. I love that.
I've got the feeling that there's a good share of those who think "moving to the cloud" is going to solve all their problems.
If your only solution for IT is The Cloud (TM), you're in for a big disappointment.
Oh, and "76 per cent said by standardising and consolidating applications" ? Methinks there's some overlap there. As well as some bullshit bingo. What does "standardising and consolidating applications" mean, exactly ? Getting your accounting, HR and CRM from the same vendor ? That might not be such a good idea. Maybe your vendor's accounting package is a pile of crap compared to another one. And how do you standardize an accounting package with a production management package ?
All that boardroom lingo is just code for "we're going to throw money at new versions until the problems stop". Cue the anguish when they've solved all their old problems and find themselves with a bunch of new ones.
Citation please ?
It's kind of difficult for me to imagine that Huawei would have the advance it has in 5G if it had had to steal the tech from Cisco who is, apparently, nowhere near the same level. If Cisco had the upper hand on the 5G market and Huawei was biting its heels, then maybe you'd have an argument.
As it is, the whole reason for Trump's trade war and Bloomberg's ruinous fall from grace is because Cisco is not the top dog anymore, and Trump & Co will stop at nothing to try and drive Huawei away.
That from the champions of capitalism. Well, as long as it's in their favor, that is.
I would rant about how utterly useless such an app is, but then I realize that, if that's what it takes to keep people to respect social distancing and minimize the strain on our hospitals, well then carry on ! And make another one with manga face filters or something !
Just keep them occupied, for Pete's sake.
Well, for everyone's sake, really.
Well, maybe they'll have gotten to the mythical mass production momentum before my good old, non-smart, 50kg CRT continually functional Philips Pixel Plus finally goes to the great trash heap in the sky for a well-deserved rest.
I will honestly regret the day that happens, that TV is by far the best I've ever had.
And it doesn't need to fucking phone home to show me my film.
Everything I have read about this scooter tells me that it was a piece of trash, made for the least buck possible.
Yet, you cannot blame Xiaomi for responding to the market. Not the market of individuals, of course, the market of pie-in-the-sky, probably-never-had-a-scooter-themselves morons who scooped them up by the hundreds to foist them upon the unsuspecting in the hope of making money - some day.
Look, I know that being disruptive is not easy. Not everyone can just profit from someone else's vehicle and time in exchange for vague promises and some loose change. Sometimes you have to put something on the line yourself. It's the good old "to earn money, you have to spend money". Then you check how much you have to spend to ensure a reliable service, and your accountant has a heart attack. So you go with this pile of crap and hope for the best, instead of realizing that, no, your idea was nice, but not economically feasible.
Oh well, at least Xiaomi got some money out of it.
If those domains cannot be censored, you can bet that the scum of the Earth are going to be all over it. Get ready for kiddie porn, crime and drugs, and all the worst of human imagination to take refuge there.
The US/UK governments want backdoors in encryption ? My God they're really going to get chuffed about this stuff.
As soon as someone explains it to them, of course. With Playskool blocks.
This pandemic is a temporary thing. We were globally all caught with our pants down, despite SARS and MERS, but that's because this COVID-19 is much more transmissible, and that much more dangerous.
But we'll get a handle on this, and the vaccine will come, in time. Things will more or less go back to what they were, and life will resume. Conferences will resume, because they are way too useful to not have, for all sorts of reasons.
People are not going to simply stop meeting face-to-face. It can be hoped, however, that people will have learned to properly wash their hands.
The next time a pandemic rolls in, we'll be better prepared and know how to react. We'll switch to online conferencing seamlessly, and ride it out like we are doing now. And, when it's all over, we'll go back to living as before.
One can argue about Google Translate and its relevance back then, or how the previous admin should have been a bit more knowledgeable, but the real problem has nothing to do with the admin name.
The real problem is that this Dirk launched a file operation without checking what he would be transferring. It's that second of inattention that always gets you, and it got him.
When you are the admin, you never initiate a file operation without checking and double-checking what you're doing. With your access, it's way too dangerous not to. He didn't check, and the mayhem lasted a month. I'm guessing that was a learning experience for him.
Translation : it is a point of failure and will be prone to breaking/blocking. Physical complexity is trouble when you're making something that will be put into the bumbling hands of thousands of idiots.
And it weighs 300 grams. Out of curiosity, I just weighed my Galaxy A3 : 135 grams. And after talking on the phone for ten minutes, I change hand because the other one needs a rest. I like the keyboard, but that thing is going to be deforming shirt pockets.
It's all well and good to use science-fiction as a basis for prediction, but the question is how can drones be useful now ? Apparently, the answer is : they can't.
We're not going to redesign our cities to fit drones. Telephone poles are here to stay for a while yet, because small towns do not have the money to bury all wires and get rid of them in one go. It'll take a long before everything gets buried, and that will only happen when burying wires is as cheap as setting up poles.
And cars going up building walls ? Please. Sci-fi is nice, but the energy cost of dragging a car up a wall is insane next to a person in an elevator. Even when we get fusion working and energy becomes "free", there will still be no reason to go and drag tons of mass to elevated places just because we can. The danger of having them drop back down in an uncontrolled manner is just too great.
While your workers are supposed to be at home in social isolation ? I doubt that mounting a new server in a rack can be done by a click of the mouse, so that means you have people that are not isolated doing the job.
I hope that that means you are adding this significant capacity in countries that are not under the pandemic panic at this time.
Freedom of expression does not mean you have the right to spout any old bullshit at any point in time. This is the exact same thing as yelling "Fire !" in a crowded theater.
As such, freedom of expression falls under the same blanket of social responsibility. You don't yell "Fire !" in a crowded place because the ensuing panic can get people injured and even killed. You don't encourage people to spread a pandemic virus because God knows there's gonna be some damn fools that are actually going to find that a hilarious idea and do it.
Your freedom of expression is subject to being responsible for what you say. The thing is, on the Internet, nobody feels responsible for anything and they behave accordingly.
"He insisted that Perens' statement was opinion, rather than settled legal fact, and that OSS has the right to withhold updates from customers exercising their rights under the GPL."
He insisted that he had the right to ignore a clear contract stipulation, and there is nothing to contradict that.
Ah, America. The best justice money can buy has once again proven that it's the money that defines the justice. If you or me tried that bullshit, we'd be in jail, but because it's a company with hundreds of thousands in the bank, it gets to decide what the outcome of the trial actually is.
Contractual stipulations be damned.
Because the kick to the behind that will follow will be much less pleasant.
Honestly, what is IBM thinking ? People may be looking for employment elsewhere, but right now that doesn't mean that they can find a position. We're in self-isolation, that makes things a tad difficult for interviews, doesn't it ?
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