Posts by Pascal Monett 19191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Sorry, but I refuse to believe that. Either they measured wrong, or there were shenanigans going on.
Cold fusion was the same thing : everyone was in awe, but nobody could replicate the experiment properly. It turned out to be a hoax.
I will gladly change my mind when a working system is shown to exist and proven to work.
Until that time, you got your downvote.
Absolutely that. I cannot count the times I have been forced to call someone and ask them if they had read my mail. "Of course I did !" is always the answer, to which I reply : "Then could you please send me the information I requested in the second paragraph ? I need it now."
Cue several minutes of re-checking, mumbling, faffing about and, rarely, an "Oh sorry, I must have missed that." Yeah, you did.
People who don't understand what they read are the bane of businesses all over the world. So I totally get your solution, even if I don't like it either.
Why are they still working on it ? Don't they have a backup of the site in its functional state that they can upload ? Don't they ?
If they wanted to explore the infection, I would think downloading the entire site onto an inactive disk then plugging said disk into an isolated server would be the thing to do, but right now I would have wiped the site entirely and restored from backup. That shouldn't take a week. What is it I don't know that prevents them from doing so ?
Yeah but Huawei could hardly demote an employee of an outside agency, now could it ?
I think this fall smore under the complete lack of engagement on both sides of the coin. Marketing blokes couldn't be arsed to find out if their representative of choice actually uses the brand, and the so-called "brand spokespeople" couldn't be arsed to actually change phones for the duration of the contract for which they accepted a tidy sum.
When companies would sell electrical equipment that behaved like a careless, angry teenager. Because back then, what was the issue with a large Gauss field ? The toaster didn't feel it, and your electricity bill was none the worse for wear.
The advent of the PC did a lot in helping us find out how to properly design electrical equipment that stays discreet and doesn't warp up the magnetic field of the entire house trying to imitate the Sun. There may still be progress to be made, but when I look at the amount of things that are plugged in around the house and without any (detectable) interference whatsoever, I think we've come a long way.
I care not about defending IBM, but Qualcomm going to court because Apple is using someone else's chips. Apple is not copying Qualcomm's design. Either Qualcomm attacks IBM for violating its design, or I don't get how it can attack Apple and expect to win.
If that is a patent violation then we need to get rid of patents.
For a country that bandies about the word "Freedom" with totally gay abandon, there's an unbelievable amount of states that have had nothing better to do than pass laws restricting said freedom for the stupidest of reasons.
It's good to see that the justice system is still rather functional, it's just a shame that it is needed to correct the total lack of common sense of the state legislators.
IIRC, they actually were designed to withstand being hit by a Boeing 707, but I'm pretty sure they didn't plan on a fully-fueled one.
In any case, they never could have planned what happened, and the fuel load was most certainly way beyond what anyone could have foreseen at the time.
Well that makes me feel just fine. Because I totally trust the professionalism and care the current FCC takes with all things that concern protecting the consumer.
And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Great location, hardly used, unbeatable price. Call today !
Because Apple is still reporting over $80 billion in revenue ?
It's nice to hear that the Golden Boys are punishing Apple's stock price, but that is really just an excuse for some to pick up some of its stock for a bit cheaper. That stock price is going to go back up because when you're making over $80 billion a year, your boat is going to stay afloat for a loooong while.
I am glad to see that the Royal Navy is proud of upholding such a time-honored maritime tradition. Reading this article I felt that this crew could very well have been the crew in Tomorrow Never Dies, with the (I guess) gunnery officer saying "Fine, we'll do it the old-fashioned way" and proceeding to track and hit the stealth ship of the Evil Genius - because they all still knew the old-fashion way.
Old-fashioned is good when it is reliable.
Agreed, this is no bug. This is a functionality that was implemented in a time when password security was not even thought about in any serious way.
The fact that the new version no longer uses this functionality means the developers have wisened up.
The fact that said new version is brand new means nobody worried about it before 2018 - which is way too late in my opinion.
As usual, all this is down to the failure of management to actually manage. There is no excuse for postponing an update at the last minute ; if management had taken the need into account, it would have planned the workload accordingly and made the time available.
Unfortunately, management today has nothing to do with such mundane things as planning and everything to do with Cover Your Ass. Since nobody has the balls to actually impose a deadline, we're all stuck with waiting until we're back to the wall and then we can only pray that nothing will go wrong - which, given Murphy's Law, has a coin toss' chance of happening.
Isn't that usually the case ?
Because, if authority was defined by competence, 1) our entire economy would come crashing down and 2) most IT admins would suddenly find themselves with board-level revenue, while board members would find themselves manning the Helldesk - and failing all Target Performance Indicators miserably.
If you follow them scrupulously and something goes wrong, you've got your iron-clad excuse right there in your hand.
And the blame gets shifted to the guy/team who wrote the instructions, and to the manager(s) who approved the instructions.
Don't you find that there's suddenly a lot less yelling in those situations ?
No, they can't. If you take vast amounts of data stored in entire rooms, and a processing unit measured in cubic meters, then yes, a machine can beat a human at Go, which is nothing to sneeze at.
But if you constrain the machine to the size of the human brain, the only thing machines are beating us at is precise mathematical computation and, until positronic brains become a reality, it's going to stay like that for a long time.
"If you wash the basmati four or five times in cold water (I use one of these) making sure pretty much each grain gets a rub between your fingers, then leave it to stand for half an hour before draining, it will then cook in 2-3 minutes when you need it in a hurry."
My dear sir, if I have to fondle each and every grain of rice I wish to cook, I'm pretty sure it'll take a hell of a lot longer than the 15 minutes of simmering the whole lot will normally require.
When cooked, strain and then rince with hot water to have non-sticky rice. Yes, it's as easy as that. I usually use an earthen pitcher in the microwave. When the water is boiling, the rice goes in and gets a twirl so as not to stick on the bottom. The flame goes to minimum and the microwave is set to nuke for 6 minutes. When it dings, I give the rice another twirl and set the microwave to minimum for another 6 minutes. At the next ding the rice gets another twirl in the water and I check its cooked state. Generally, for Basmati you'll need another minute or three. Then strain and rince with the microwaved water and voilà : perfectly cooked non-stick rice.
You can't fail, even if you're reasonably sloshed.
Yeah, he thought he was more intelligent than the rest of them.
Well, now he's going to have the time to take a full course in Defrauding Investors 1 0 1, courtesy of the California Justice System.
In ten years, he will claim that he is the brainchild of Icahn, and he'll make a fortune.
Funny how that sounds like Logitech had no idea how such a thing could possibly happen. It's almost as if Logitech was begging us to believe that there was some rogue engineer that put an API in place and Logitech wasn't aware of it.
Because rogue engineers are totally a thing these days, right ?
Slack shut down the accounts of people who had been to a blacklisted country, but no longer were there ?
That is not how you do it. You use geolocation to forbid blacklisted countries from using your app from the forbidden country.
Otherwise, you are saying that it is the people from those countries who cannot use your app wherever they are, and that's called racism.
And, if they're in the US, you're getting sued. As you should be.
Apparently, they're not doing their job very well. They might want to start using some intrusion detection software, I hear that that is a thing these days.
Either that or they need to pay their personnel better and train them more often.
That is a shame. It means that no actual decision is going to be taken, arguments are not going to be heard and Justice has no say.
All that in the name of protecting the revenue of a corporation that has more money than it can spend.
Google obviously knew what it was doing ; it evaluated the man (a crook with a strong penchant for money) and found the right amount to shut him up before a judge could lay in with a decision that might hurt Google long term more than losing the case would.
Hey, two crooks would obviously find common ground, right ?
No, no, you're not with the program.
After Serverless Computing, we'll be ushered into a new era that will be called Power-Assisted Computing. In order to properly adapt this paradigm, you should build a Computer Assistant permeated with AI and 7G connections.
Oh, and a holographic screen. It has to be holographic.
It certainly looks like the way to go. Logitech is just one example of companies that don't actually care about providing you with a reliable service, they're all just faffing about, changing products and functionalities as soon as a new PHB takes office.
There is no long-term plan and no care of not disrupting the user experience.
It's all about getting the dough now, then screw you.
That is why I am convinced that true home automation is going to actually be open source - by the people, for the people. That will be the only thing that actually has a chance of working for more than 18 months.
