Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Well apparently not fantastic enough to refuse selling out to the Master Borgifier.
Shame on those people who decided to cash out and let a "fantastic resource" get emasculated by Microsoft.
And don't tell me they didn't have a clue. The CxOs who took the decision knew Microsoft acquisition history just like the rest of us - except they got truckloads of cash.
I hope they enjoy watching their life's work become a husk of its former self.
Well here's some news : even if the USA is royally screwing itself over, the rest of the world is getting along fine and many, many countries have full fiber FTTP projects going on.
I myself, after having left a year ago a village where I had an acceptable 12MBps connection and arriving in a village where there was nothing but a communal WiFi that worked when it wanted, I have now signed up for and will be getting a 1GBps connection as of next January 3rd. For €50/month. Oh, and there's no throttling or limit in the amount of data, like some operators actually dare to do. If I download 1GBps for thirty days straight (supposing I manage to find enough data for that), then that's my business.
So carry on, USA. You will soon be in the backwaters of the internet, and I'll be reading about how you barely manage a national average of 25MBps whilst surfing at 40 times that speed.
I've got a different problem with that : who on Earth decided that is it a good idea to use the gram to express exoplanetary loss of mass ?
We're talking about a planet that is light-years away, losing copious amounts of mass, and you deliberately choose the smallest unit of mass we have to express it ?
Saying ten thousand tons of mass per second wasn't impressive enough ?
I think that, as far as the FBI is concerned, if you're making bomb threats, you're a terrorist.
BTW, what kind of fucking idiot thinks that mass-mailing bomb threats is going to fly under the radar of the law ? If you've encrypted some poor sap's data and demand money, I don't think the Feds are going to get involved and the cops are submerged in more important stuff, so you're safe.
But bomb threats ? Country-wide ? Unless you're in some other country (no idea which, komrad), you're going to learn what life is looking over your shoulder all the time.
They target the performance market, ie gamers who are willing to put top dollar to get good equipment (okay, if they choose Razer they may be making a slight mistake somewhere along the line, but that is the reasoning).
So please tell me how someone wanting performant hardware is going to accept crippling his FPS to mine stupidcoin ?
There's a leap of logic there that seems impossible to me. Like selling a Ferrari fitted with a tow hitch. Because sure, the guy is going to use his Ferrari to tow a caravan. Right.
Absolutely. There is no doubt that the merger will see those same employees punted out without so much as a "thank you for your efforts".
If you are in the situation of having someone asking you to come to them, knowing that in a few months at best you'll be out of a job, why wait ?
Corporate gratitude does not exist. Management wants them to stay so that management can get their bonuses and not have too much hassle. Once the merger is done, then management will throw those precious employees to the wolves without a second thought.
So no hesitation. Jump that sinking ship.
Some private company decides they have the right to use state-level tech under the excuse that a fucking pop star might be confronted with a stalker ?
What are bodyguards for ?
This is gross misconduct at the very least. In a country that calls itself a democracy no less.
We're going to get mass wireless charging by next year, instead of getting any of those recharge-in-a-minute carbon nanotube batteries we've been promised for a decade.
Figures that we'd get a more wasteful way of recharging before getting a better way of storing energy.
I opened this article thinking that scientists had finally explained dark matter.
Not at all, they just found an old galaxy with present-day amounts of the stuff.
All well and good, and now it must be asked what measurement error made us misinterpret the data on all the other old galaxies, but this does nothing to explain dark matter.
So, tell me that Richard Smith is going to be dragged before the judge and sentenced for gross negligence and endangering the private data of almost 150 million people ?
Oh, of course not. He drove the system into overdrive, but retired when the shit hit the fan, so instead of going to jail, he's getting millions of dollars.
Ah, isn't capitalism wonderful ?
A bit of glitter for the season, it fits.
The lady has a PhD, and has already held CxO positions, so there's not much to complain about yet. The real question in my mind is : is this ethical thing just lipstick or is Salesforce actually committing to something and, if yes, what ?
It's not like Salesforce allows customer details to be displayed publicly, so what is the direction that this thing is supposed to take ?
I mean, Salesforce is in relation with Uber, so what is Mrs Goldman going to do about that ?
How on God's green Earth can one justify that kind of functionality ? What deranged monkey with a keyboard decided that a closed app can be revived without user consent ?
If I shut a program down on my PC via Task Manager, that thing stays dead or else there is a malware infection and that PC is getting wiped and reloaded from backup.
What an effin' crazy frakkin' world we live in.
I hate smartphones.
If ever this test period comes out negative, it will be a serious blow to the people who swear it works.
If it comes out positive, it will be the true start of Big Brother and you can expect it to infect every portion of your life in rapid succession.
In either case, I will be watching for the follow-up.
Given that the CIA is known to have dabbled in the drug trade in order to fund its black projects, the war on drugs was doomed from the start.
Given that the US had already failed a war on alcohol, you'd think that they'd have got the message, but no.
So, looking forward to a war on porn ? I'm sure it won't be long.
I'm quite happy with my i7 6700, I do not want to return it.
I surf the web with NoScript and UBlock Origin, and I only go to places I know are reliable, so all this hullahoo leaves me stone cold.
In a few years, I'll probably have to change my equipment. By that time, whatever Spectre issues still exist will be corrected in silicon and I'll still get the performance I need.
There might also be another thing at work : all the old timers that made Office and Windows the two breadwinners for Microsoft have now left. Their knowledge, the care they took to not disrupt the user experience too much, and the rules they had set down to keep things smooth went with them.
Now Microsoft probably has scores of youngsters who are certainly very Agile, but not Thorough, and the result is Microsoft is starting to get a shade of a bad reputation.
"Slack continues to enjoy a greater share of the market in spite of the gang at Redmond flinging out a free edition of their platform to get users on board"
Of course Microsoft is doing that. It's Market Capture 1-0-1 : hook the greatest number possible on the free version, then transition them to the paying version.
Or kill it and propose a new product that does the same thing, but you have to buy it.
Yeah, but that is not the same. The police are in your face, demanding your passwords. They've already decided to spoil your day and you know it.
That is not the same as listening in on your conversations via backdooring the encryption. You won't know about that until they come and arrest you, if it ever comes to that.
"what we were promised: the reward for lower pay was a good pension"
And now BT is trying to screw you over on that promise. That is a clear indication of how long-term promises need to be backed by an actual, legal and binding contract that clearly states what is supposed to happen.
BT can try pulling this scheme off (although it is being thwarted, thankfully) because individuals have no piece of paper with BTs obligations on it - they just have a recorded history of being on a given pension fund for a given amount of time. That offers them no control and no recourse.
If the legal beagles weren't doing their job, BT would be screwing many people over and some manager would be getting a fat bonus.
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