Posts by Pascal Monett 19424 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
But I'll repeat myself : the only reason I'm on Windows is because all my customers are.
I am around six years away from retirement: On that day, I swear to God I am setting up a Linux Mint machine in my home and I will transition everything I need or want to do to that machine until I can reformat my Windows machine finally get rid of that bloated mess and once again have a Personal Computer.
Emphasis on "Personal".
Ah, PowerPoint.
As lead Notes developer in a company that was actively transiting to Sharepoint, Outlook and MSSQL (at least one good decision), I had been called upon to present the current uses of major Notes applications and the future of Notes in the company.
I dutilfully put together the memorandum of all the Notes applications being slowly decomissioned, but I just couldn't help my self and, on the last page of the page of the presentation entitled "The Future f Notes at <company name>", I used this kind of image as background with, at the bottom of the slide, the words "Any questions ?".
Even the IT director chuckled at that, so I consider it a total success.
Move is not the correct word.
It should be replicated to Europe, just like DNS databases are replicated across the world.
Make continental copies, with multiple governments and/or organizations pledging to ensure funding of the operations.
If one continent abandons the project, the replicas will be there to ensure continuity.
This project is very much an essential resource for computing at every scale.
Once again, despite himself, Trump is doing exactly what is needed to ensure that dependance on a single authority is banished - especially when that authority is held by an orange baboon flinging his shit at random walls.
Looking at that image with the puny human standing practically directly under one of the claws immediately makes me think that the robot is going to go "This thing is in my way".
Down goes the claw, clamps around a screaming human futilely trying to liberate his head from the steel grip, and up goes the claw at (literally) breakneck speed, ejecting the obstacle a hundred meters away so it can work in peace.
I have learned a long time ago the usefulness of an UPS to keep PCs from getting damaged by power surges or cuts.
Funny, because I live not far from a nuclear power station (about 15km, give or take a few). You'd think that the quality of the power line would be reliable so close to the generator, but you'd be mistaken.
All of my electronic equipment is, at minimum, connected to the mains with a surge protector (TV, stereo, fridge, freezer, etc). In my home office I have a 1600 VA UPS to which all my desktops, my NAS, the connection box and the telephone are connected.
If there is a power cut, I power down the computers and leave just the phone and the box connected to ensure that I can still use my laptop's WiFi if required until the power comes back on.
But I am never again going to trust the mains to give proper juice to my computer equipment. Yes, I know that, in the past 20 years, standards have evolved and computers are more resiliant.
I'm still not taking the risk.
I have enough history with Ubisoft to have decided to never buy a game from them again.
From the insane requirement to have to reinstall Battlefield 2 every time there was an update (and I was ADSL at the time - took all evening), to the fact that when wanted to update Battlefield 2142 it asked me for the CD key (hello ? I bought it from your fucking store, remember ?) and when I complained about it, Ubisoft just shut down my account (no, no reimbursement, don't be daft).
I've learned my lesson. Ubisoft can go to hell.
I honestly doubt that there will be a wave of new acquisitions purely to get Windows 11.
Prices are up, Trump is doing his damndest to make international trade a nightmare and people just don't have a spare $5000 lying around to "upgrade" a computer that does its job just fine, thank you very much.
Companies will bear the brunt of the upgrade wave because compliance, but I think Windows 1 0 is going to be around for a long while - maybe even longer than XP was.
Not everyone is a gamer.
This is starting to look like a (very high stakes) game of ping pong.
Russia : take this, we disrupt your nuclear reactors
Ukrains : take this, we obliterate your TikTok soldiers
Russia: oh yeah ? Well now we infiltrate your command structure and steal yiour battle plans
Ukraine : Really ? Well now we know where all of your soldiers are and can prdict their movements
. . . (to be continued)
"an agent can analyze an email and determine "this is a bad return address," Lord said. "This is a fake logo. This is a URL that's hosted in a .parks domain and has only been up for the last 12 hours. This is legitimately bad. Filter it to the security team"
I fail to see how you need pseudo-AI to get such results.
I programmed my own personal spam filter that could easily detect when someone claimed to represent (example) Microsoft(*) but the return address was somewhere.iranistan.com. I was capable of going through all http links and check if they were pointing to legitimate Microsoft domains. I had an extensive subject dictionary where I stored the blatant examples of things that spammers would use (mostly spelling errors and references to orders that needed to be confirmed and such). I also had a keyword database that looked through the mail checking for the most obvious things spammers put in their mails (I need someone to recover the money and send it to me, etc).
It was accurate, evolutive, and stored the offending spam in a reference database with the reason for its removal as keyword.
I'd have to go check the code, but I'm pretty sure I didn't write 10,000 lines to get this result, and there were no calls to any external libraries whatsoever.
This pseudo-AI thing is an industrial crusher looking for a walnut to justify its existence.
*Replace Microsoft by any company, bank or official organization
So let me get this straight : networking is getting so complex that we're going to have to have a 2U server rack with 6 core Xeons and 2 Nvidia H100s just to read El Reg ?
Maybe we could tone down government snooping a bit and get back to regular GB fiber on a 6cm2 box ?
And how many jobs have been created in India ?
I think there should be a law whereby, if a multinational corporation cuts jobs anywhere, it does not have the right to create jobs elsewhere before a given amount of months.
If you're firing people, you don't need to hire.
As usual, his attention span being that of a goldfish, actually having to do actual "work" (for a given value of work) and somewhat justifying it is an exhausting exercise.
Best get back to the arena where once a year he can promise whatever bullshit for next year and have investors gobble it up.
"Uber “never processes cancellations concluded via the in-app cancellation flow in the final 48-hour window.” "
Hey Uber, why make your life difficult ? Just say that you never process cancellations in the final 12-month window and boom ! an extra year of extortion that is "perfectly justified".
You have computers, don't you ? They can process a cancellation in milliseconds.
Bunch of lying thieves is what you are.
In the Notes environment, I have long since learned that if there is a change to be made, make a non-replica copy of it on the server, restrict ACL access to only you, the server and the person authorizing the change, then fiddle to your heart's content until you're happy with the result.
Then you can ask the requester to review the change and, if approved, move it to the production db.
If there's a problem after that, you can point to the email saying the change was approved.
Of course, that only works on databases that are not hundreds of GBs in size.
Let customers understand that AI is shit.
Once enough people have understood that it is not reliable, they'll be clamoring for proper people at the front line again and AI will be confined to tings it can properly deal with, like detecting unusual variability in start brightness or, eventually, detecting early signs of cancer in patient's radioographies (which, contrary to chatbots, are always confirmed by an actual doctor).
To think that Eisenhower gave Americans a warning about how Democracy was already being subverted.
I think that everyone should view that speech and compare with the actions of Trump's government and the current behavior of all those ass-licking Republicans who endorse every decision of Trump and his government however stupid it may be.
I'm not even going to expand on how having a criminal as a President is a bad thing, just think about the fact that Trump still thinks that TIVO is still a thing.
I'm guessing he thinks that streaming is either a euphemism for diarrhea, or a very kinky thing he should ask Stormy Daniels about.
In any case, I think this is one of the best summaries of the situation you can expect to find (well, not on Fox & Friends, obviously).
I've always found that when you do screw up (and it will happen), immediately reporting the problem and telling what you did wrong does two things :
1) the customer knows that you're being honest
2) the customer likely knows how to fix the issue quickly, or at least the steps to fix the issue even if they take time
You might get a chewing out, but you deserve that anyway.
However, trying to pretend you don't know what happened is the worst thing you can do because the customer likely has somebody that will find out exactly what happened and, at that point, you'll be thrown out and your reputation will be much worse off.
It's about bloody time.
I have never understood this precipitation to store confidential company data on someone else's server. Once upon a time, even the contact list of a marketing jocky was considered top secret. Now, just slap the term "cloud" in the conversation and suddenly everybody is willing to give up the company jewels to someone they don't know, on servers they have no idea who manages them, because of a contract specifying some artificial performance parameters (eh, Microsoft, with your Office 365 that has never held up to its name ?).
Okay, if they start using European cloud providers, from my point of view the madness hasn't exactly stopped, but at least their data will no longer be at the mercy of a US National Security letter (remember that thing ?).
It's the CIA.
I'm terribly sorry, but between the historically proven interference of the CIA in other country's elections and the upcoming revelations of how the CIA is responsible for JFK's assination (which is the one thing I am willing to give credit to the orange baboon for, since he's the one who finally published the files the world has beeen waiting for for decades), I couldn't care less how the actual CIA director is going to handle the situation.
Somebody needs to hang for all the evil the CIA has done (well, there's certainly more than one).
Agreed. I have no doubt about it because Borkzilla does not care about providing companies with a stable environment. It just cares about finding reasons to disrupt everything and get everyone in to a subscription system.
Which is how we ended up with Windows 11, when the previous version had been announced as "the last Windows ever" and there is nothing in 11 that cannot be updated in 1 0. And don't get me started on the artificial hardware requirements . . .
Bottom line is : Redmond doesn't give a damn about providing you a stable service. It only wants your monthly money and will give you the bare minimum to ensure that you stay there.
Which it can do because, for historical reasons, management is addicted to its Powerpoint charts and pretty Excel graphics instead of wanting a backend computing environment that actually provides 5 nines in service.
Yes, it is.
The article clearly states that the Russians solved it years ago.
Initially, when I began reading this article, I was confused. I was thinking that I was reading about a failed attempt this year, or maybe in 2024.
It took me a while to realize that I was reading about an "incident" that happened 20 years ago and the lessons had indeed been learned.
So, good to know, but this is more of an historical artifact than actual news.
Okay, one question : how was the "threat actor" capable of creating a symlink without having access to the system in the first place ?
Even if he sent it via mail, said symlnk would only work for the user having recieved the mail, no ?
There is no strategy when you change your mind from one day to the next following how the wind blows.
That is how Trump has always managed things : loudly claiming success, then blaming others and weaseling out of the way when the house comes falling down.
It's just that now, it's the White House, and the US economy, that is going to fall down.
And with three and a half more years of this bullshit, it's practically guaranteed that the US economy is not going to stop it's slide down the shithole that the orange buffoon is gleefully digging.
