Posts by Pascal Monett 18931 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
And if you think you'll be the winner, you're dead wrong.
China can not only raise a 10 million-strong army, it can also afford to lose it and raise another one.
The US lost a mere 50441 men (no disrepect intended) in Vietnam and the US government almost imploded.
If you intend to fight China to the death, you may as well dig your own grave.
640 million ? That's almost as much as the entire North and South American continents !
Are there that many terrorists on US soil ? Why are they not apprehended more quickly ? I mean, if 1 in every 2 people are terrorists, either you need to drastically expand your prison infrastructure, or your political base.
Honestly, am I supposed to believe that there are over 200 million terrorists on this planet ? Where does the FBI get that data from ?
And it will still take up to 3 years to get it to the consumer.
And after that, it will take another few years before Apple, Samsung and Huawei avoid having their models burst into flames while recharging.
So, in ten years time, we'll finally have batteries we can recharge in just five minutes - from cars, to phones, to rechargeable AAs.
Looking forward to it then.
Simply because he wanted to see if the (at the time) latest Intel CPU could do proper semaphore stuff and other things, this kid (at the time) kickstarted an entire industry that now has a firm majority of all the servers in the world under its reign.
No, he didn't write all of it and yes, it took a lot of people a lot of time to get to this point, but he was the pebble that started the landslide and he is still the God-Emperor, The One Who Decides. And thank God he does.
I don't think we'll be seeing ads in Linux any time soon.
Yeah, I got those too. At least one also claimed to have hacked my email as well by including an actual password that I used to use on sites that required a login and I didn't care about it. The wording was actually above par for what is generally written by that kind of scum.
Of course, it didn't impress me for one second. No, you haven't hacked my computer. That means that you have not enabled the camera, since I disabled it in hardware. Even if you had, you can't remove the lens lid and record anything. Also, I have never used that password for my email. And finally, no, there is no clock ticking now that I have read your stupid email. Email does not work like that, and you didn't think of requiring a return receipt so no, you have no way of knowing that I read it.
But I have to admit, the non-tech-savvy population could be impressed by all the verbiage.
As far as I'm concerned, for the home user there is most likely only one use case : viewing videos when your IP is deemed unworthy of being granted the privilege.
What's that, BBC ? You don't want me to check out that short informational video you made on <some subject> ? Fine, I fire up TunnelBear, choose the UK as my exit point, and I can view the video now.
I'm not saying I do it all day long, but it's an available solution to a problem that should not exist in the first place.
Apart from that though, I have no idea why I would want to use a VPN all day long.
There we go again. Since some bad people use encryption, nobody else should be able to.
Well I have some similar information for you : guns are often used by drug kingpins and terrorists in the course of their criminal activity.
Funnily enough, there is no call to limit the availability of guns.
We need a merry-go-round icon.
"Tommy Jeans [..] included chips in some of its products that allow the user to track how frequently they're wearing a particular garment"
That is what we are polluting the environment for now ? A chip that can tell you how many times you wore something, wow. Gobsmacking. How utterly useless.
You want to put intelligence in clothes ? Make chips that can tell if the shirt goes with the pants. Make chips that bleep when garish color combinations are being chosen. Make chips that tell you "Alert : clothes tissue is stretching beyond advisable limits - choose larger size".
That would be smart.
Well, now that you've mentioned it, Johnson is preparing a National Government ID project to tie all different services together and bridge these various ID number issues.
It will be a grand, sweeping project with an initial budget of just £80 million, to be completed in three years. Three years after that, costs will have ballooned to £450 million, and the planned end date will be six years from then. After ten years working on the project, UK Gov will sadly conclude that £935 million were wasted and bin the project.
And now the system is patched, and the function call result is no longer ignored, right ?
So all the systems that were put in place and tested based on ignoring the function's result are now going to have to deal with a new, untested scenario : the function returns False. I'm sure they planned for that back then, but how come nobody ever tested a False before ? Because if they had tested the False scenario and found it worked anyway, this bug would have been raised a long time ago.
Once again, improper testing is the source of a bug.
Of course it does. Bring everything into Azure, tag on subscription plans and watch the Cloud revenue stream gradually replace the OS one as Windows slowly fades into oblivion (ok, veeryyy slowly).
Microsoft is not full of idiots - just the GUI department is.
I don't get it. You're doing kernel development, not photo-enhancing software, raytracing optimization or advanced Wall Street financial algorithms. You want your kernel to run on all the hardware ? Then publish your test data and get the bugs fixed.
But that will fix your competitor's bugs ? Um, we're talking about Linux. It's free. You're contributing to the community and making all products better. There is no competition here, there's only the product that best suits the customer's needs.
This is definitely the area in which product is judged on merit, not on price. There is no prejudice in publishing all the details of the bugs so that the community can benefit and solve the problem.
This secrecy mindset is legacy from the time when everything was closed source. The world is changing, get with the program.
They are both an enormous worry. Once upon a time, the notion of confidential had meaning. Now, apparently, banks have forgotten that and see no more problem in putting customer data on someone else's server.
And if this is the trend, then saying that you won't deal with a bank that uses The Cloud (TM) is not an option because they're all going to be doing it.
Reminds me of a saying with the words 'Hell' and 'handbasket'.
That may be true for literary texts, but for technical manuals English is by far more precise and specific than French. I once had the opportunity, early in my IT career, to do some Assembler coding on a microchip from the French chip maker Thomson. My mentor asked me if I wanted the English manual or the French one, with a hint of a smile. Being bi-lingual, I answered that I would prefer the English version, if you please. He was obviously pleased, and that intrigued me.
When I asked why, he just handed me the French version to compare.
Oh. My. God. What a mess. They tried to keep the pages identical, but most things that were said clearly in one sentence in English were a complete paragraph in French, and still not clear after all that.
That's when I learned that, at the time at least, Thomson's official stance was to send the manual in English when you bought the compiler. The French version was an optional extra.
7 out of 10 are white people and you tout the diversity horn ? Who do you think you're kidding ?
If there was actual diversity, it should be 20% african, 10% arab, 10% asian, 10% indian, 10% chinese, 20% south american and 20% caucasian (I think that about covers it all). You can adjust the percentage points as you see fit, but 68% caucasian is a massive bias towards white people. Again.
And, given that white people are apparently rather easy to recognize, other ethnicities should be getting the lion's share of that database.
How about not putting in a WiFi or BluTooth antenna ? That will already do wonders to protect them.
Because if you're expecting connected robots with a robust firewall and efficient intrusion detection, well let me just say that, post-Brexit, it would appear there won't be much competence available to write that kind of code.
and had features that are basically six to ten years old, and there were still people to buy it ?
I am gobsmacked.
With the thickness, the bezels, the dismal camera quality, I would have expected it to be priced at $80, not more than a grand.
Extreme pricing failure.
"Uncle Sam remains convinced that the vendor's close ties to the Chinese state serious advance in 5G technology make the manufacturer a massive espionage and surveillance competition threat"
And Uncle Sam is right, and Uncle Sam can also shut the fuck up. This is Capitalism At Work, and you, after having spent the past eighty years screaming the apology of Capitalism with a capital "C", have no right to be against it when you're not the one reaping the rewards.
Um, sorry but that's not a Windows problem, it's a hardware problem.
Upgrade the RAM from 1GB to 8GB, upgrade the processor from a Pentium to an i7 4600 and put a 1TB SSD to boot on and you'll only need a minute to log on, if that. Of course, you might want to upgrade the processor first, because there's a good chance you'll need to change the motherboard as well.
I'm guessing because, at design stage, they're not supposed to go down, so nobody bothered to build a case for testing that.
In truth, this cloud thingy is still pretty new and we're all learning the ropes. In a decade or two, when most of the bad situations have been encountered and resolved, we will then have a manual for proper design and rollout of a cloud infrastructure.
Right now I think we're still feeling our way.
So, neutron star mergers make the heavier elements. It's nice to have confirmation for that, but that brings a question to my mind.
A neutron star is, if I'm not mistaken, a star that failed its end-of-life bid to become a black hole. So, if I understood that correctly, if a neutron star is the last step before punching a hole in the Universe, then how many neutron stars can merge before the result finally turns into a black hole ?
Ideas, anyone ?
Man, it's good to be alive today.
After all the times I wanted to personally go to 12025 Waterfront Drive, drag whoever was at the helm of Suite 300 behind the chemical shed and shoot the effin' bastard, finally, finally I can envision my future without a striped shirt and iron bars.
ICANN is still scum, but now that it has been emasculated I can live with it.
You bloody well did, and a refreshing difference it is to read about somebody for whom the security of personal information is indeed a priority.
They detected the threat and neutralized it before a breach occurred, their patient data is on a separate system - bloody hell somebody give those guys a medal !
To all the morons that got their unsecure, unencrypted databases hacked this year alone : THAT is how you demonstrate that security is your top concern.
Now that is a real problem. You can argue that images posted on the Internet are public, but you absolutely cannot argue that the guy labeling images made a slip of the keyboard. If image labels are racist it's only because some asshole in charge of classification was a racist.
No wonder facial recog systems are acknowledged as being biased against non-white people. If any random AI training project has racists labeling pics then it would seem quite difficult to have any AI project that only has non-racist people handling the data.
To think we're in the 3rd millennium. Seems like we'll need a few more millennia before Humanity actually becomes intelligent.
Indeed, and replacement cartridges are not priced following the gold standard.
When I got fed up with inkjet printers that could barely last one full cartridge, endlessly needing head cleaning and whatnot, I got a B&W laser printer and I've never been happier. Pages are printed in mere seconds, quality is excellent and a toner cartridge lasts hundreds of pages (of text, obviously).
One day, I just might shell out for a color laser printer, but for now I have no need of that.
In any case, inkjets are for suckers.
If I were an avid tarot reader, it is absolutely obvious that I would immediately think of Oracle Corp when stumbling upon a site named Oracle Times. It is blindingly obvious that nothing containing the name Oracle has ever, in the history of Mankind, ever meant anything other than Oracle Corp.
Someone is going to have to invent a new concept for Ellison's ego. Or maybe we just use him as a reference, as in "that guy has an ego of 1 ellison".
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