Posts by Pascal Monett 18239 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Indeed. This whole article is just an official announcement to learn the lingo and what the dance steps are.
Sysadmin who is supposed to be able to code ? I don't know one who doesn't, personally. Nor do I know any sysadmin worth a damn who isn't fully aware of what is running on his network and how it works - well enough to fix issues most of the time, that is.
For me this article is a confirmation : DevOps is just the new moniker for what competent people have been doing since IT was birthed.
Microsoft cannot invalidate your license key. You paid for it, it is yours forever.
I still have my Genuine XP disc and the license key that goes with it. That means that I can install XP if I wish - and have hardware that can run it.
Windows 7 is, of course, the same. I've paid for it, so I have the right to install and use it - as long as the hardware is compatible with it.
The day PC hardware will tell me to get something else is the day I fear. That day I will truly have no choice but to go Linux all the way, because Microsoft has burned all the bridges now and Windows 7 will be the last MS OS I will ever use at home.
No, it hasn't.
20% market share for one entire year of free download is NOT a success.
If Windows 1 0 was indeed the bee's knees as we have been repeatedly told, then everyone should have downloaded it. Win 1 0 market share should be in the upper 70%.
The program has demonstrated that Microsoft cannot capture more than one-fifth of the market with a free upgrade.
I count that as a failure.
Trump is a billionaire - being an asshole comes with the territory.
This numpty is nobody. Comparing him to Trump in any way is actually an insult to Trump because when Trump manipulates people his victims don't notice until they get the bill. Trump is actually far more shrewd than this looser, he knows when not to go claiming something that he might actually have to prove. Trump makes claims that are just vague enough and, when you challenge them, he takes you court and cleans you out.
This idiot, on the other hand, did go to court, all the way to the supreme court, and he lost all the way.
Looser.
Surely the police should see that the more they abuse these powers on minor crimes, the more they risk having them restricted or more tightly controlled
We would like to think that that is indeed what will happen. Unfortunately, mix a dose of reality with a helping of cynicism and what will more likely happen will be that the "abuse" of powers will quietly slip into the "regular use" category by virtue of wearing down resistance to the concept.
The article clearly states that this abuse has already taken place thousands of times - it is therefor most certainly not a mistake. The police got the tool with the use cases, saw what it could do and immediately started applying it to everything regardless of how it should be used.
And for all of you who say "I don't see what the problem is with the NSA slurping all the data" - THIS is exactly the problem. If regular police regularly abuse their powers even when they know they will be caught at it, how much more do the secret police abuse powers when they fully know that nobody will ever know about it ?
We obviously cannot trust the police, the CIA/NSA/FBI, or the government to abide by the rules. They must be checked, there must be oversight.
Or you can just admit right now that Democracy has nothing to do with your country anymore and publicly acknowledge that you live in a police state. That way you'll stop living a lie.
From the first few lines on that forum, I clearly get the sense that nobody is very impressed with ImageMagick's way of doing things.
My favorite comment thread :
It's really a command-line tool at its heart. The library is essentially just a wrapper around this command-line tool.
That sounds bass ackwards if you ask me. A command line tool is usually a thin wrapper around a library, for a reason.
and the beautiful conclusion :
And yes, it's a mess. That's why the much saner GraphicsMagick was forked off it… in 2002. People just never migrated.
In other words, ImageMagick is something that should have died at the turn of the millennium.
Well let's see now :
- godlike opinion of one's own status - check
- inherent contempt for bog-level "lusers" - check
- expressing said contempt while still thinking oneself immaculate - check
- demonstrating abysmal social skills by spending 80% of the email exchange on everything but the problem at hand - check
Yup, you obviously are engineers. If you were in Marketing the company would have closed shop a month after starting.
Awesome. There is simply no other word to qualify finding a solution like that.
This is what happens when Science and Engineering meet at the highest levels. Pure genius and exemplary DIY are the result. And they're probably not even going to write a paper on that. It's just business as usual at NASA.
Thumbs up Kepler team. You deserve it.
That is a requirement that I have only ever witnessed on illegal Torrent sites. And it always makes me laugh before I go download somewhere else.
Okay, I do not download copyrighted material I don't have the right to, but if I have bought the official CD or DVD, I consider that I have the right for backup purposes (T&Cs be damned). So I go find a torrent to download. Then I stumble across these sites. I know why they do it - they think it fosters a "sharing community" by blocking the freeloaders. In truth, it just gates the community to those who have been there the longest.
So let them have their secure illegal download section. I buy my CDs anyway*.
* Some of you are thinking : but if you buy them, why not rip them yourself ? That's my first try - but some CDs have digital protection. Before bothering myself with cracking that - which is generally a chore that I prefer to avoid - I search for the kind soul that has already done the job and posted the result. If I find nothing, then it's on me. And you'll not find the result because I'm not a pirate, it's for backup purposes as I said.
That is indeed curious. On the other hand, I'm an obedient little cheese-eating surrender monkey ; I set up my Synology NAS with 4 3TB WD Red HDDs (well, there's a Seagate one in there just for kicks).
I check out what WD Black is and find something that really makes me laugh : WD is making HDDs for, get this : CLOUD STORAGE !
If ever there was a "sucker born every minute" product, this has to be it.
Maybe we're simply seeing the start of a return to normal operations in businesses that gave 1 0 a whirl to see what if, and decided that no, no if, and back to previous, stable, environment.
If that is the case, I expect to see more of this.
In any case, for a free OS so heavily pushed, the results clearly indicate a failure to impress the masses.
And who can resist "8,000 times better" lead times ?
Certainly not the people who can believe that that is possible.
As far as I'm concerned, the faster you go, the less time you have to "make quality the top priority". There's something inherently in opposition between quality and speed, in my mind.
On the other hand. you'll break things a lot more, so it's a good thing DevOps makes you code like the wind.
The whole cloudy DevOps speedy demon future we're being pushed to just means that a developer's career is going to start in DevOps, constant panic and crunch time, endless releases and starting over, then migrate to legacy when the youngster is burned out and fed up with the commotion, then end with freelance consulting when old enough to enter the fray with a solid, cynical view of the whole process.
Business-impacting technology ? Why don't you ask 123-Reg how well that went for them ?
There's Google, and there's the rest. And the rest need to invest billions in data centers if they want to have a chance. Those who can't become Google-scrapers.
Flash appears to be the same game. The incumbents have the investments made and money to invest more. Newcomers are learning that the entry ticket costs more than they hope to earn.
This is pure capitalism. No amount of lobbying or backroom deals is going to change this market. You gotta come with the billions, or you can leave while you still have a car to leave with.
I can easily imagine that this ASCII/EBCDIC issue is going to take mountains of cash to change, meaning that we are going to be saddled with the problem for decades to come - or until the mainframes start failing (which, due to the mountains of cash already paid for their maintenance, ain't gonna happen anytime soon).
Yeah but cash registers are typically not used by anyone outside of company employees - which makes them a different problem compared to ATMs which are used by anyone.
Also, cash register issues are the problem of the company (as Target found out last year to its great detriment), and its customers, whereas ATM issues are everybody's problem.
Finally, cash registers are generally under more direct surveillance than ATMs (and have never been attacked by backhoes - yet). People standing around an ATM generally do not get noticed by passers-by, whereas Joe Hacker is not going to have much time to muck with a cash register before store security is standing next to him and asking questions.
But yeah, Target is a clear demonstration that cash registers are a weak point whose security depends more on luck than actual defences.
I am in the process of developing the ultimate lecture program. It will be titled 42, and I will systematically be drunk every time I enter the stage.
I promise it will be entertaining, enlightening, and slightly insulting to almost everyone.
Tour starts in Europe this century - watch this space !
How to overcome the nigh irresistible drive to push your company to adopt Yet Another Fad.
It's difficult.
Because managers are very sensitive to peer pressure and marketspeak, and they live with the illusion that they are more enlightened than the keyboard serf that is tasked with solving the issues and dealing with the daily grime.
Because managers are paid more and we live in a society where value must be defined by a monetary amount, so the serfs mathematically have less value - except that managers never solve problems, they only create pressure.
But technology obeys no marketroid. It is possible, or it isn't. If it is, then marketroids can wax lyrical and invest in lexical creation all day, they are not doing the work. If it isn't, well even managers cannot declare the Second Law of Thermodynamics invalid.
In the end, you can slap any currently-trending moniker on it that you want ; developing applications is done one way : the developer talks with the user to determine the real needs, including the unspoken ones, then returns to his cave to hammer out the code that will make it happen.
Software development has always and always will be the same process : someone has a problem, someone else can code a solution. Inventing fancy new names for that changes nothing and is only done by those who do not code solutions.
Now get off my lawn !
I agree with your points about Disney and prison, absolutely. However, the solution to that is not Google, it is voting copyright length back to where it is supposed to be. That is a problem for Parliament or Congress, not Google either.
As for Google, let's not keep wool over our own eyes. Google is a private corporation, and has pushed the law as fast as hard as it could from the beginning. Disney has nothing over Google, but who is keeping Google in check ? Nobody.
Yes, copyright laws need to be reviewed and length of copyright needs to pegged at life of author, max (and no, corporations are not authors). Personally, I think 25 years is long enough.
But what are we going to do about Google's hold on personal information that is OUR property ?
Hear that faint sound of heavy breathing ? That's all the malware scum hyperventilating at the thought of all they will be able to accomplish once they hijack an entry point into there.
Ah, Microsoft. In just two weeks you unveil OS-level QR codes and now an API for One Drive code execution. Really guys, you need to slow down. The blackhats don't have enough time to keep up with you there. Do you intend to drown them in vulns ?
But doing that requires increasing the headcount - supposing that salaries are attractive enough to get qualified people there in the first place (I have doubts on that).
Then departments get criticized for being staff-heavy, so they lay staff off.
Then departments get criticized because they are slow and inefficient, so they hire temps while "a more permanent solution is found".
Now we criticize them for having all those temps. Return to step one and start over again.
There is no way that circle will ever be broken.
We need a merry-go-round icon.
I'm sorry, I thought Uber was just an intermediary and that Uber drivers were not its employees.
If that is the case, then what does surge pricing ability have to do with Uber driver availability ? Am I supposed to think that Uber drivers in India are going to decide not to offer their services because of that ?
Or is it more like Uber is dictating everything and treating drivers like employees on hand, while using wool-over-eyes techniques to avoid supporting the costs of its actions on the other ?
The guy is dead. Whatever he did and whoever he contacted are known elements. What he said to those contacts is probably known as well. Given the care he demonstrated in disposing of his private equipment, it was a million-to-one that he'd be stupid enough to leave anything on the work phone - and now we know he wasn't.
If it had cost $10,000, then fine, I would agree and say go ahead, crack it. If the guy was alive, definitely crack it whatever the cost. But over a million bucks down the drain to crack a dead guy's phone that is virtually guaranteed to not have any info ? That is waste, pure and simple.
The USA has a long history of not implementing anything that comes from Europe.
They laughed for ages at Europe's "monopoly money", ridiculing the colors and everything else. Now, of course, they have grudgingly followed suit because money is everything after all.
Chip & Pin is the same thing. I went on holiday in the US in 2014. When I first tried to pay gas with my card I found that, although the pump would accept my European Visa, it had maxxed the PIN length at five digits. Most people I know only use 4, but I use 6 digits. Without any way to enter the 6th digit, I couldn't use my card. I have no idea if 4-digit PIN cards work either - does it force 5 ? Whose bright idea was it to put artificial limits on PIN length ?
In any case, just like Microsoft's IE, the US has its own implementation of Chip&Pin.
Then, of course, the eternal subject of going metric. I doubt that will ever happen - the US is much to used to imposing standards on everyone else and currently has the tendency of snubbing anything that comes from Europe. Like the Bill of Rights.
This hack is the result of an impressive amount of knowledge of how the inner blocks of Windows fit together, wrapped up in that moment of genius of "hey, what if I tried this ?" and bingo! a new hack is born.
It doesn't feel all that important - until some scum finds a way to use it to download some OS-hijacking malware. The real question is : how on Earth did including the means to parse a URL be considered a good idea when making the functionality list of regsvr32 ?
A part from the obvious "it's Microsoft".
"Since warrantless searches are presumptively unreasonable, and the good-faith exception is inapplicable, the evidence must be excluded."
Can someone make that stick to the current NSA hoovering of everything in order to have a warrant signed afterwards ?
Because in my view, what the NSA is doing is not very different.
Yeah, NOW you do.
But you didn't take it seriously enough BEFORE the brown stuff got widely dispersed, did you ?
And the irony of it all. 67 out of 115000 servers. A 0.0006% mishap that is positively trashing their reputation. I think other hosting services would do well to sit up and take notice. Operating at minimum financial cost is something that can cause great financial cost down the line.
You can go collect your Good Citizen medal. And when you are shot because some spook thought that your habit of smoking on the balcony every evening at 7:45 sharp was the sign that you are in communication with terrorists, you can be consoled by the notion that you tacitly agreed to all this.
Go in peace, citizen: Big Brother is proud to have assimilated you.
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