Posts by Pascal Monett 19436 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Sorry, but no applause shall be given to a group of greedy, selfish bastards who dearly hoped to keep the whole thing secret in order to pad their coffers.
It is nice to know that there are some elements of ICANN who do walk the path of righteousness, and their steadfast courage and willpower should be commended, but the Board in its generality has become a hive of scum and villainy and should be purged with fire, not applauded.
Brilliant use of public funds there. Congratulations.
So now tell me, since it is obvious that the previous ERP was so terribly specced as to be useless, is it the same moron who is doing the specs for the new system ?
Or do you have so much money that you're just renewing ERP systems as you would go on holiday to a new island ?
Agreed as far as location is concerned. Maybe people with feature phones don't work in office buildings ?
But as far as tracking is concerned, all governments have no need of anything special, they can all pressure the operators to give the user location history already, so no loss of privacy there, it's already lost.
In response to your questions, I can only give you my personal experience. I have a Logitech G15 gamer keyboard. I've had it for years now, and it works flawlessly. I use it for gaming, but I also use it for programming, typing reports, and posting on forums. It is not loud, the keys have an agreeable response threshold and the backlighting, although not RGB and just plain amber, is pure gold as far as usefulness is concerned.
I hope that it will last for many years to come, because apparently Logitech does not make it any more. It will be a nuisance to find another keyboard with so much functionality that works so well and is so pleasing to work with.
Yeah, except in the USA, where the so-called President has now denied ever suggesting that people should ingest or inject bleach, after thousands of calls to health hotlines and some people actually stupid enough to try it.
But, as usual, the Supreme Asshole will not take any responsibility. The excuse, now that that bombshell of his own making blew up in his face, is that it was satire.
Sorry, bud, being able of satire requires intelligence, and you have failed to qualify there.
Three years in a row.
You tell that to the 1190 people who died yesterday.
By the way, when are you going to obey the orders of Your Dear President and inject yourself with bleach ?
Or do you have enough neurons to know that that is a bad idea ?
We already know you support Trump, despite every abysmally stupid thing he has said - which is basically everything he has ever said. Mentioning Hydroxychloroquine is really not necessary to get a clue.
Advocating the death of people you don't know just to excuse yourself from doing your civic duty to help others is the height of selfishness.
Not defending lawyers in any way, but in this case they are doing what Apple is telling them to do. A lawyer cannot continue a case without his client's approval.
And this client is even more spiteful than a divorced woman who has been cheated on.
At least she has a good reason.
Thank you for saying that. I cannot count the number of times I have been annoyed at forum idiots pointing out that so-and-so has x number of confirmed bugs whereas Windows "only" has y number, assuming that they closed the argument by virtue of counting bug reports without taking any account of severity.
The next time I encounter that argument, I will cite that line and refer the offender to this article.
If you "add one letter" to a domain name and honestly believe that you're doing nothing wrong, you truly are a wonder of stupidity.
On the other hand, if you fail to track your domain renewal dates, you're just run-of-the-mill stupid and you deserve to learn the hard way.
Of the utter incompetence of their so-called President.
As usual, some idiot stands up and forgets half the story, conveniently the half that makes his statement empty. Yes, the local Wuhan police force initially clamped down on the hero doctor, but Beijing reversed that in record time, forced the local police to reverse their decision and apologize, and initiated a travel lockdown like no country has ever seen. And a billion Chinese dutifully obeyed.
Meanwhile, the US buffoon that serves as President only issued confinement orders when he longer had the choice, as per his habit, and now there are clueless idiots who are protesting the confinement in the streets.
Pity COVID-19 targets essentially old people. If it targeted blinding stupidity instead, it would actually be useful.
It is good that they keep a free tier available, some people obviously don't have that much use for audio transcription. But it is indeed perfectly normal that they adjust their offering to market conditions. Regardless of the desires of the investors, if they have a good product it would be a shame for the company to fold because they couldn't hold the demand and stay alive at the same time.
Let's just hope that they don't use servers in China.
Don't think so. It is, however, another brilliant example of the UK doing the reverse of the EU. Last week, Germany decided for the decentralized approach, so obviously this week, the UK goes for the centralized approach.
Duh.
Now, the fact that the UK wants its own app has nothing to do with that and everything to do with ensuring that the snouts in the trough are proper British snouts, not icky, virus-infected furriners.
When you go around shrieking about how a Chinese company puts your comm infrastructure at risk without any proof whatsoever, and try to strong-arm everybody else to "trust" you just because, well you can hardly be surprised that China, in turn, takes your arguments at face value and sets its own comms infrastructure rules down.
Except that China doesn't have to go shrieking that Cisco is beholden to the NSA, everybody knows that - and there's proof.
It was created billions of years ago, and ejected from its solar system following some celestial mechanics not in its favor. It spent untold millennia in the vast emptiness of space, once again caught a glimmer of heat and light for a brief instant, and will now probably never venture into another star's heliosphere again.
Food for thought.
Thank you for that information. Curiously, NSO Group's website makes no mention of office locations, contrary to just about every other commercial website I have even seen. I even googled "NSO Group locations", but that gave me either their own website (which is useless for that), or links to things that only mentioned that it is an Israeli company.
Now I understand that the lawsuit has jurisdiction. Thanks again.
I can find nothing about the NSO Group having US offices. So, when Facebook filed a lawsuit, it was filing against a company in a foreign country.
Despite the US Government's best (and continued) attempts, US law does not apply internationally, so how can a US court claim jurisdiction on this ?
And why does NSO Group care ? It's not like it is going to open offices in the US, so they cannot be made to pay any fine that the trial might impose on them.
Is there a special case here, or can anyone in any country file against a foreign company now ?
Because I seem to recall that, when the LHC was going to be fired up for the first time, somebody in the US filed a complaint that it might create a black hole that would swallow the Earth and the judge in charge said, among other things, that he didn't have jurisdiction over Switzerland.
So why here ?
Statements like that make me immediately think : citation, please ? What is the scientific founding of your statement ?
It's not because you can articulate correctly that I am automatically going to bow before your words. You still need to make sense, and your arguments still need to be justified.
It's like that stupid video about 9/11, showing one tower collapsing. The voice was saying that it was obvious that the debris was falling at the same speed as the tower, when the video was clearly showing that it fell faster.
If you're too stupid to realize that your eyes are telling you a different story than your ears, then you don't deserve to be part of the human race.
Sorry, but stupidity really gets me rankled.
"The UK economy will need the help of the UK’s flexible workforce to get back on its feet as we emerge from this crisis and that is going to take some time. Now is not the time to apply a straight-jacket"
Nice to see that somebody has a clue.
The only question left is : is it not too late ?
Exactly. Everyone is impacted. Apple has more money than most, it will weather this storm without problem. The shareholders might not get dividends, but they're the only ones who care about that.
"Apple is now facing the second recession of the iPhone era. Everyone knows that fiscal Q2 results will not be good"
Boo hoo and cry me a river. There already have been hundreds of companies to bite the bullet. More than 20 million people have lost their job in the USA alone and you're "worried" that Apple will not make its usual billions ?
Wall Street is overrated.
While government busybodies dole out permissions. Congratulations, way to run a pandemic.
Health care workers should automatically have permission - once they have signed up and given proper credentials.
Government busybodies, on the other hand, have no business accessing this data and be kept out of it.
But hey, it's Australia, what can you expect ?
Seems obvious that, if China has a communist political regime, it also has a vibrant capitalist society on the rise. Geely is going to run out of fingers to put in pies at the rate they're going. It's all over the place.
Which is not really something I like very much. I prefer a company that centers its attention on doing one thing well. Making cars is not trivial, the tech is constantly evolving and if you're wasting money on theme parks then you might not allocate enough for research. I don't like that idea.
And 500 satellites a year ? Have they not heard of the Kessler syndrome ? If we keep having companies dream up satellite fleets by the hundreds, stargazing difficulties will be the least of our problems.
Icon for Get Off My Field Of View
So you won't be buying clothes or household items any more then ?
Not doing business with China is not an option until you find another country that makes what you need, and there are few countries outside of China that make clothes, light bulbs and all the rest of the tat you have in your drawers and closets. Good luck finding a fly swatter that is not made in China.
There are some options, but not many. So I think you'll find that you'll continue doing business with China anyway.
I have written scripts for my customers that use FTP internally several times a day. Some of them were written six years ago, some were written last week. They are only stopped when the functionality they support is deprecated by business choices.
I'm pretty sure I'll be writing scripts with FTP routines this year and next year as well.
FTP is far from dead. It may not be fashionable, but fashion has never dictated my working tools.
So Google is going to have to its hand up the health databases skirt. There's a lot of reassuring noises in the communication, a lot of making it seem like user privacy is paramount, but Google made a mistake in communicating that they will approve apps that correspond to their criteria of privacy.
There's a lot of wiggle room there.
But we'll see how it goes down. I didn't have a problem with the centralized approach, but at least now we know the direction apps should take.
Looking forward to reading about the API functions, and if there are any hidden ones.
The whole process sounds rather simple to set up, but it's not exactly simple to execute - unless Teams automatically loads an image when sent a link.
Given that this is Microsoft we're talking about, that seems more than likely. Still, you have to be able to send the person a link. That means that you have to have the Teams user name or something like that. How easy is that to get if you're not in the company Teams list ?
Full disclosure : I don't use Teams, as you might have guessed.
That miscreant would look really conspicuous standing outside my house with a laptop. there's not another building within 20 meters, I'm at the ass-end of a village and there's nowhere to go, so he couldn't really pretend he was just looking for his way on Google Maps because there is no way Google Maps could have brought him to the side of my house.
As usual, yes, I'm sure that electromagnetic radiation can tell you a lot and you're not the first to say so, but the spy industry relies on stealth, and standing in the middle of a field with a laptop next to a house is not exactly stealthy.
Much more interesting if you're in an office environment, but then most calculations in an office are not done on a graphics card.
I'll file this in useless but technically interesting.
And so it continues. Through the blind stupidity of the greatest orange moron on the planet, Chinese companies are forced to build themselves up and create their own ecosystem, instead of inserting themselves into the Western ecosystem.
I am not an economist, but even I can see that it would be much better for Western economies to have Chinese companies continue to be subservient and not become deciders, but that is what is happening.
The Dragon is waking up. Now is the time. In the coming years, people will come to see that Trump has handed China the excuse it needed to become a dominant economic power. Little by little, it will be China deciding standards, it will be China setting examples and innovating. Think different ? They're Chinese, they do that by definition.
Then US (and Western) companies will by crying over their lost market influence, about how it's not fair and they should be given subsidies to survive.
Yep, well, too late for that. The beginning of the Fall of Western Influence has happened, and thy name is Trump.
But one day I did see a Fenwick crash an entire rack of servers.
I was parking at a customer site when I saw a Fenwick barreling down the loading dock with a rack of servers on its enormous tongs. I remember thinking "this guy is going a bit fast with that", then I saw two guys running behind the Fenwick, shouting. I stopped the car and got out when I heard an enormous crash. When I turned around, the Fenwick was stopped, the rack was lying on the ground, and there were three guys arguing.
Turns out the two guys who were shouting made the driver think there was someone in front he couldn't see, so he slammed the brakes, which had the inevitable result.
The rack was fine, if a bit scratched here and there, and it turns out that only a few hard disks had bought the farm. The kit was new, so I guess insurance paid for the disk replacements. They had one hell of a time getting the rack back up again, though. I don't know what happened after that.
I'll never forget the almost cartoon-like quality of those two guys running behind that Fenwick.
It might, but I wouldn't count on it. The larger companies should have the IT chops to allow people to work from home, but will they have to will to do it is the question. I'm thinking not, because having the employees on-site is generally better from all points of view, not to mention security. Having all those people working remotely must be giving the heebee-jeebees to IT admins everywhere.
Then, of course, you have all the companies that simply can't work from home : plumbers, construction workers, supermarket employees (and stores/restaurants/bars in general), medical companies, etc. Basically, if your job is to deal with the public, you're not working from home.
Finally, you have all the consultants in various capacities. They can't work remotely because the clients want to see them there. Sure, right now I have customers allowing me to work remotely, but that's because they don't have the choice - there's work to be done and it can't wait. When the confinement is over, I've already been told in no uncertain terms that I will lose my access. Security first.
So no, I don't see that there is going to be a change in the way we work, globally speaking. Yes, some companies will realize that they can reduce their office space requirements by having people work from home but, little by little, the manager paranoia is going to creep in and the question of are they actually working is going to haunt them. And that will be the end of the experiment.
Do they hand them out like M&Ms ?
I had to check, so I searched for Capita share price. If I got the right one, Capita PLC is at 31.49 right now at the London Stock Exchange.
That means that this guy was going to trouser no less than 185,791,000. Now he's "only" getting 55,737,300.
Don't ask me to weep for him.
Well that explains a lot.
You mind explaining why an SQL server wasn't good enough ?
Except for the fact that SQL doesn't belong to Microsoft, of course. Oh, you forgot the existence of MSSQL ? What a shame.
Looks like NIH is well and alive at Microsoft. Either that or Microsoft is desperate in finding things for Sharepoint to do.
It's when the lies became obvious (the fake videos) that my confidence deflated. Not that I had had much confidence to start with.
I have always been wary of virtual reality. I already see no interest in motion blur - when I move my mouse fast enough there's already enough blur, thank you.
That said, I am willing to admit that Augmented Reality might be an interesting idea, just like Apple was not wrong when it first tried to interest people in tablets. The Newton failed because the hardware was just not up to the job. Microsoft failed after that, and only when Apple finally made the iPad did Microsoft finally pull off the Surface (and that, only in the 3rd iteration).
In other words, I can imagine that Augmented Reality will be a thing, but that will only happen when the glasses have a battery charge that can support a full day's work - and that won't happen until our modern "smart" phones can last more than 12 hours without desperately needing a top-up.
Because if technology cannot give us a 200 gram slab of communication that can last more than 12 hours without a recharge, then how can Magic Leap be expected to deliver a product that can not only deliver a highly graphically-intensive product (something that phones do not promise), but also package it into something that hipsters can wear in the streets ?
It ain't possible. I'm sorry for all the certainly intelligent people that have spent a good portion of their life on this, but it just ain't feasible.
That said, Abovitz still deserves to hang. A liar is a liar.
I'm sorry, you are obviously operating under the obsolete idea that security services exist to ensure that government activity is secure.
That is last-millennium thinking.
These days, security services are there to ensure the government that the people they govern are happy and complacent and won't come with pitchforks to put their heads on a spike. To ensure that, their job is to listen to everybody, scrape all social networks and record every tweet to ensure that pubic ire is directed to the acceptable scapegoats (immigrants, foreigners, the French, arabes, asians, etc).
Therefor, the GCHQ is perfectly happy with the Chinese being able to listen in to UK gov meetings, since they will get the information anyway through Huawei 5G routers that have yet to be installed.
Ah, the miracles of technology have no bounds.
Wow. Okay, let me just, for a second, imagine that this argument is actually honest. So present, in a no less than five pages, an explanation of how recording my mouse movements on any of your web pages can lead you to define my activity as fraudulent.
Next, outline what it is you do with that data when you have defined that my activity is not fraudulent, and oppose it to what you do when you define that it is.
Then, in no less than two pages, explain what gives you the right to implement these measures when you are not requesting my permission to record this data.
Finally, explain how you expect to escape GDPR fines when it is proven that you are doing all of that without consent, without warning, and in total violation of privacy rules.
Oh, and for bonus points, explain why it is that Amazon does not need to use that technology even though it is making billions more in transactions than you are.
A twelve-year-old would have had more imagination.
And, pray tell, how exactly do you "simplify" a black triangle ? I can't imagine how much time was wasted agonizing over which font to choose, what size the letters should be, and what color they should be in. Then, of course, there's the obligatory writing up the "excitement" that the new logo generates. What a waste.
At least there wasn't too much whalesong, so it could have been worse.
"Facebook has [..] agreed to remove any content considered “anti-state” after telcos in the nation reportedly cut off access to the social network's systems"
And there you go, now you know how to ensure that The Zuck does what you tell him to. No more Congressional hearings where he pretends to give a fuck, just shut off his platform until he does as he's told.
It's nice to see that there are some people that have balls in this world. Shame that none (or very few) of them are in democratic countries.
Facebook is a company. It will parrot whatever people want to hear to polish its image, and it will do whatever it takes to polish its revenue.
