Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
And the added benefit is the large drop in stupid emails trying to get me interested in something ridiculous because all that inane activity is being posted on walls which I don't have.
I like Facebook for the fact that it has drawn all the idiots together and keeps them mostly in their own little ball pen. It's like having a soundproofed kids area in a restaurant. You can enjoy the food and the service without being annoyed by all the shrieking.
Anyone betting against China in the long-term is a fool.
Twenty years ago every was calling them copiers. We were laughing at the quality of their products. Sometimes we still do. There will be nothing to laugh at the day China is dictating international commercial treaties instead of the US - and that will happen.
It'll be interesting to see the influence of the Middle-Kingdom's growing power on those commercial agreements. One can only wonder what they will do with the concept of privacy, for example.
Today, it is still the US calling the shots in international treaties of all kinds. Soon, it will be China. Get ready for it.
I can't imagine the number of Hail Mary's this guy is going to have to go through.
Not to mention being the leper of the congregation for the rest of his life.
Such a sad way to ruin one's reputation in exchange for what, a one-minute thrill ?
He certainly won't be playing any organ in public any more.
If you're running a legitimate business, there is no place for anonymity. You want to get known.
Anonymity is a protection that should be allowed only for individuals, and only within the scope of the law.
An anonymous business is, by definition, something the law should investigate thoroughly and without mercy.
??
The process of making paper includes steam or chemicals.
Burning entire forests is listed nowhere in the requirements.
Typical PowerPoint presentation material.
I have a proven process derived from extensive viewing of The Mentalist that I would be willing to offer training on. It's only an eight-week course and I'll only bill a paltry $250,000 for the service.
Cloud is still in its infancy, obviously. It would seem that some cloud services are more pared to the bone than others.
The only good thing about all this is that the great unwashed will learn, by trial and painful error, that price is not the only thing to take into account when signing up for a cloud service.
Like the automotive industry, the only good thing in this evolution is that, in the end, cloud services will perform better, because those that don't will wither and die. The only question is : how long will it take ? With the amount of people who pay and find shoddy performance good enough, it might take a while.
Now, if you're basing your business on it, I'm sorry but it seems to me that you should reevaluate your ROI criteria on this one.
Bit of a cheeky one there, IMO.
Given that I couldn't write a VM to save my life, I think that Xen has some pretty damn good programmers.
Nobody's perfect, of course, but VM programming seems to me to be especially difficult. With any application, new security holes are regularly discovered. Some of them are trivial. With VMs there have been, to my knowledge, no trivial exploits.
That's not bad right there, in my book.
Given the eating habits of every coder I know, that rule means teams of two, maybe three.
Certainly not twelve.
But no matter, there is only one way to develop : ensuring that you have the input of all people that matter to the project.
Mind you, that doesn't mean all the people listed in the project manifest. It means all the people that matter to the project's success. The key users who can express what they need and how they can use it, the db admin for access and optimizations, the network engineers for traffic analysis and routing solving, and on the side, the manager for specifications and for knowing who to keep away from the grunt work in order to prevent stupid ideas.
The possible insecurity of your keyboard is indeed not something that most of us should be concerned about. Especially when scientists have the ability to ghost your keypresses from listening into the electromagnetic fluctuations that they generate.
The real issue is : how many people are actually at risk outside of a wifi café ? Not many, I'll wager.
I'll stick to wired keyboards though, because I see no reason to make things easier for the bastards.
Nice to know that somebody is taking care of the cleaning around here. Not that I think that Verizon actually knows what it is going to do with YahAOL when it has it, but that has never stopped a merger before.
Now the wait starts for news of the write-down Verizon will publish because YahAOL has suffered loss.
No we won't.
This experiment requires a 2.3-ton plane with the wingspan of an Airbus A380 to transport 2 guys and 633 kilos of lithium batteries at a speed of max 90km/h. During the night it goes slower to save on energy.
Add 50 passengers with their luggage, stewardesses and in-flight entertainment, not to mention active radar, ILS and autopilot (with the assorted computers and black boxes) and you'll need a football stadium-sized wing to just keep it in the air, to say nothing about taking off.
I salute the accomplishment. It demonstrates improvements in solar cells and is certainly a feat of engineering. But let's not get carried away, this toy is not the future.
Agreed. Unfortunately, contrary to real life, on the Internet you can't look ahead to see that the alley on the left is dark and foreboding, while the street ahead is well-lit and inviting.
On the Internet you go into the alley without noticing, then find out you shouldn't have after being clobbered and pwned. Sometimes a while after.
It takes a bit of experience to know that that link is not one you want to click on. Would be nice if links would have a security notice attached to them - something Google is more or less trying to do.
This guy is the quintessential geek. He doesn't look like much, in his pic he seems the shy, quiet kind of guy, but give him a PC and Internet access and hang on to your hat 'cause there will be a storm.
And he even gets to work with cute geekettes !
Hats off to such mastery.
That's easy :
"Did you put in all that security stuff ?"
"Yup."
"Okay, ship it then."
As far as security is concerned, IoT makers are still in the process of finding out which book to read.
There is no IoT security standard, there is no International IoT Security Review Board, there is no joint effort, no announcement of intent, no nothing.
At this point in time, security has nothing to do with IoT and IoT wishes nothing more than things stay that way.
aka a piece of paper, a rubber rod, a silk plank.
PrivacyShield is about as good a shield as a paper boat would make a good Dover ferry.
And it's replacement, from what I understand, is still made of paper, but just reinforced with some glue.
It's all a vast joke, and we're the butt of it.
"Like, you know, going after criminals. As in 'people who are committing actual crimes' as opposed to setting up people who might do something that might be illegal."
Setting people up is an American specialty. Like the guy at a bar asking nothing to no one, not thinking about sex and just tired from his day, who gets chatted up by a cute (cop) girl who pushes him to accept a bit of nooky for money, then gets cuffed on the premise that he accepted, so he's the one who is guilty. That's called fabricating a crime in my book, and ruining a man's life like that is a shameful thing to do. It happens all the time over there.
Funnily enough, you don't hear about sting operations where a person was caught accepting an offer to off their spouse without having asked for it. You do hear about the stupid ones posting a request for an assassin, but never the other way around. Somehow it seems that US cops are fine with pimping their female officers to create a case, but not at ease with offering murder to a disgruntled spouse for the same result.
What any lump of matter is doing is being held together by the strong nuclear interaction - no computing needed.
The brain is a much more interesting example - we still don't entirely understand how memory works or thoughts are processed, but progress is being made.
Once we know how the brain works, there will be another leap ahead in processing capacity and, probably, the ever-elusive field of artificial intelligence.
Then we'll end up with a prissy golden robot telling us to shove off and leave his pint of cinnamon-flavored lubricant alone.
Hint : it may have something to do with not wanting to bring anyone in on the racket in order to not share the spoils.
Plus : another person involved is another mouth that might blabber. Tying up loose ends is always a messy job.
"HPE always carefully considers any price changes for our products and adjusts prices based on exchange rates and currency fluctuations"
Let me correct that : HPE always carefully considers any price changes for our products and rises prices based on whatever excuse can be found in exchange rates and currency fluctuations.
That's more like it.
After graduating with a degree in computing ? I agree that nobody can know everything, but come on. A loop is part of the basic, simple things one does all the time when programming. If you can't do that with a diploma in hand, the basics are simply not being covered.
Now, if the degree concerns network infrastructure and communication, then you're not supposed to be a programmer. You are destined to become those upon whom the Internet relies the most : the exalted Network Engineer, the guy who knows how a packet goes from A to B and why. The guy who knows what an MX entry is and what it's for. The guy who digs all the thrilling stuff they're doing in them thar Clouds. I don't mind you not knowing how to code a loop, you are the other side of IT - the one that supports the data flow that programmers create.
The curriculum might need a bit more clarity in that aspect.
The only thing any diploma can prove is that you have the intellectual level to comprehend the difficulties in a certain area, and hopefully the baggage to understand what data you lack, how to find it and the ability to learn it.
Once on the job, you still have to confront the real world with the academics version and learn to compose with the demands of the situation. It is an entirely new training session for some, which is why it is interesting for companies to get at them young and unbent by years of doing things the wrong way. Get 'em young and you can easily bend them to doing things wrong your way.
It seems that, nowadays, companies are created to be bought by other companies. Is anyone still interested in actually running a company ?
I think it's a shame that this startup got bought - it had an interesting idea. Now that idea is folded into Salesforce, which means that not many people will benefit from whatever it was because Salesforce is not likely to develop the idea and open-source it.
And I also wonder how Salesforce is going to advance on infrastructure management when AWS is tasked for that job. On the other hand, Salesforce now has a great development environment - entire warehouses of kit that will be shut down after the switch. So maybe it is a good thing and we will see some progress on the matter of data loss in distributed environments.
Spot on. I am certainly very curious to know what could happen on a plane that could incapacitate hundreds of people before anyone could hit an emergency button of any sort, and do that without blowing the plane out of the sky immediately.
Explosive decompression is out of the question, because even if it happened in the pilot area, someone would have been able to get in and radio a mayday.
Fire on board would take too long to avoid a mayday.
No structural damage would have killed everyone without also making the plane fall from the sky.
The only practical possibility I see is a gas of some sort, or gradual lack of oxygen, that made everyone fall asleep without noticing. How to explain its presence is beyond me, but there has been a prior case of an airplane that crashed because the pilots hadn't seen that the oxygen system was not activated so they did not have any oxygen renewal at 15000 feet and all fell asleep, then into a coma. They were dead before the plane crashed. So there is a precedent of sorts to this kind of situation, but outside of terrorist attack, which would have been claimed, I can't see how something like it could have happened.
I wonder how the Bitcoin aficionados are going to react to that. It is obviously the end of the vaunted anonymity of Bitcoin transactions.
I'm going to keep this article bookmarked. Every time I read someone spouting on about how Bitcoins are anonymous, I'll link it.
But leave it as soon as you can !
Um, I have a problem here : how can advising people to move their companies to Silicon Valley, which is already stuffed to the gills with startups, be consistent with recognizing that the French startup situation is roaring ahead ?
I get that VCs in California have more experience, but might it not pay off to actually stay in France and create a new version of startup culture ? Especially if things are starting to ramp up, as they seem to be doing ?
Silicon Valley is certainly a beacon, but it is located in a socially broken country in a region that has enormous energy and climate difficulties with a corrupt government to boot. I think it would be good to stay away from that nest of trouble and favor the fruition of a new startup-friendly environment.
Be it in Germany, France, or heck, even the UK.
There is no rule that says that Silicon Valley is the only place to build a startup. Let's not continue to blindly follow the USA everywhere it goes. Especially these days.
You see, that is what I find supremely annoying with just about any fanbois community. You make a valid point, you're experiencing difficulty, and the only thing they come back with is insults, demeaning words and contempt. Then they complain about how small their market is.
That kind of attitude is a plague for computing in general. It keeps new people from getting interested and locks everything down to only the saintly original group that understands everything and never has any problem whatsoever.
A 6th-level black belt in any martial art is never going to have that kind of attitude. He will seek to give you examples and help you until you figure out what you're doing wrong. We need people with that mentality in IT.
Indeed. What the hell were they thinking ?
"Hello, could you please deactivate your protection for the trial ?"
"But of course, right away" replied no salesperson ever. Deactivate protection ? WHY ? Pay the licenses, you'll have the app and it will be legally protected.
I would have liked to be a fly on the wall of that meeting.
I had actually reviewed the list before posting my reply, and had been surprised at not finding it - but didn't follow up on that. I was always convinced that the operator at the station had died of radiation poisoning. My recollection is that I had read that somewhere.
Following your comment, I reviewed the article on Wikipedia.
Thank you for giving me the incentive to correct that mistake.
That attitude is a one-way ticket to a very nasty surprise down the line.
I hate "social" sites and I always have. Starting with the pseudo-relationship enablers (Meetic & Co), and right up to, of course, Facebook. The need that most people apparently have to self-divulge their every living moment to everyone is, in my view, a sickness that needs to be cured.
I have real friends, with whom I have face-to-face or phone/Internet conversations. That is social enough for me. I am smart enough to know that, if you don't want your information to get out, don't post it online. Especially not on a site that is specifically tailored to correlate and sell it.
How can an almost exclusively female population of butterflies survive over a decade ?
I understood that males from other regions come in to bang to exhaustion, but it seems weird that it should be enough to generate another generation of almost-only females.
Nature is one hell of a complicated thing.
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