Posts by Pascal Monett 18916 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
You compare a 2-ton car to a 360-ton dump truck and you only use engine power to validate your argument ?
Let me break it down for you :
Bugatti Veyron : 2.53kg / kW
BelAZ 75710 : 109.09kg / kW
It's pretty damn obvious that 3300kW isn't going to turn that monster into a dragster.
Effin A.
Nobody is going to tell me I can't back up my own data, and nobody is going to keep me from doing so. Anybody with a brain at KCL should have a stack of optical discs at the ready, because completely losing data when you have an IT department with dedicated staff and adequate funding is just proof of total incompetence from the top down.
Absolutely. Congress has a deaf ear because no Congresscritter has been negatively impacted by the problem.
Just wait for one of them to have their IoT fridge order 5 tons of milk and have the driveway blocked due to the 10 delivery trucks, plus the bill.
THEN legislation will get pushed through faster than the result of a Taco Bell lunch two hours later.
IBM, for Pete's sake. There are chat clients all over the Internet with every license imaginable, and IBM has to jump into the fray with a bleak, barebone excuse that would get squashed by what some college kids could have done in a week-end.
This is friggin' IBM. That product should have been a polished, almost-saleable demo. It's not like IBM hasn't already dabbled in this market. Someone mentioned Notes, which means they know about Sametime. God knows that IBM has had long enough to play with that to know what features are required in a chat client.
Somebody reassure me : this is an intern's summer project that finally got the green light, right ? Or did they allocate resources to it last week and two guys looked at the spec sheet, then checked the delivery date, and said "right, we'll just get a connection working then we'll see how it goes" ?
Because this is obviously not a project that has actually been worked on by a team, with proper milestones and so on and so forth.
Um, did anybody tell him that the PC market is shrinking ? A crash in supply does not mean that the PC market is getting better, it just means that what consumers are left are going to have to pay a bit more a wait a bit longer.
To hear this guy you'd think he's expecting the market to take off again. Sorry, bud, that market had its glory days; now you're in Aisle 12, right before the dog food.
"Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content, or the primary purpose of the web property."
I'm waiting for the next announcement in this vein :
"We will now implement restrictions on ad serving by ads that misrepresent, mistate or conceal information about the developer's intent to subvert and/or take control of a hapless viewer's computer."
Not holding my breath though.
So, speeds won't be as promised and roaming could be compromised if governments don't play nice.
Why would governments play nice ? Communication means surveillance these days, and each country has made its own choices for that. It would be astonishing that every country would decide on the same surveillance hardware, so I suppose that there are at least two incompatible types in service.
I would be even more surprised if any country would be willing to change that hardware in order to "play nice".
So I am fully expecting governments to churn out lengthy explanations as to why The People would prefer one choice of roaming options over another, when The People would certainly prefer that It Just Works and couldn't care less about why.
Wait and see, I guess.
Let's not complain too much : now there will be a real-life example of the tech. In a year or so, we'll be able to ask : so, how's those pads working at the generating energy part ? What are the exact figures ?
One way or another, those figures will be published, then compared to the amount of energy required.
Then we'll be able to have a hearty guffaw and that will be the end of it.
Because the only reason we're still hearing about this nonsense is that nobody is publishing actual figures, everything is just marketing. If we could harness marketing energy, we'd already be exploring the stars.
I'd love to go on a sarcastic rant about how Manglement is Doing It Wrong Again, but the simple reality is that the Cloud can benefit if one knows exactly why one is intending to use it.
With GitLab, the pros and cons have clearly been extensively studied and the decision made on facts, not marketspeak - which is hardly surprising from a group of computer nerds for whom I'm betting marketspeak does not impress.
So this is not really a failure of the Cloud, just a victory for Reason Over Marketing.
I do find the conclusion very interesting though : paying for sub-par performance because time-share.
That's a point I'm going to have to add to my list of arguments against.
Ever heard of WebMD ? Any idea of how many people go there before/in place of seeing a real doctor ?
I don't, but I Google anything I don't know in most other domains, so I wouldn't be surprised if a fair proportion of people consider WebMD to be their doctor.
Now, how about someone creates WebLawyer ? How long do you think it will be before people are logged in by the millions to search how to divorce (continuously trending topic), how to write their will, etc ?
That is what actual lawyers have to fear. Obviously, court cases will continue to exist, but there's a chance that they will be less frequent when the population uses a rather reliable tool to do the gruntwork for them.
And I'm guessing WebLawyer will probably be more accurate than WebMD, because the margin of subjectivity is much, much smaller when it comes to law.
These little guys were all ready to live their life and suddenly they are crippled and probably can't figure out why. Although they might be able to understand who is responsible (ie white coats).
It's cruel, but medical research often is. The only justification is that the goal is to improve Man's understanding of biology to better help in the future.
As cruel as this is, I'm pretty sure that the people who will be saved by whatever technology this experimentation gives birth to will be mighty happy that they can walk again.
But damn, those poor monkeys.
Um, I do believe that, if you are not specifically in the path of the GRB, you can be a few dozen light-years away from a supernova with nothing to fear. Not immediately anyway.
If, on the other hand, you are smack in the middle of the GRB cone, tens of thousands of light-years are not going to save you.
Now, if this gamma radiation is spherical and not targeted, then I'm guessing that the minimum safe distance can be more than a few dozen light-years. Personally, I would prefer being at least a thousand light-years from any such phenomena. Vela's supernova was 800 LY away, and we're fine.
Oh yeah, loads of fun. Especially when you're the one getting blamed for the cock-up.
Happened to me a few times, but thankfully every time the boss above the nitwit actually had a brain and could understand the situation, so I never got too roasted about it. Had that not been the case . . I prefer not to think about it.
The Cloud appears to be an environment where the provider can change the conditions of use and the entire environment whenever the provider wants.
I can accept such an attitude for a free, open-source product destined for individual use. I cannot accept such arbitrary changes for professional, paying customers.
A business needs to be reactive to its clients needs, not to its own tools for running the business. No company can survive when its internal management software switches gears and changes everything without notice. Internal gears need to be well-adjusted, properly oiled and completely reactive. Disruption of smooth operations is something that should be planned, approved, explained ahead of time, set to a calendar that everyone knows and respects that calendar.
Microsoft obviously has the right to make any changes it wants, no discussion there, but I have trouble believing that companies are going to put up with such upheavals at unexpected intervals in the long term.
I do believe that ship has sailed a long time ago. Abu Ghraib ring a bell ?
You've stepped to that level. Then you built a condominium complex and a parking zone on it. Apparently there are now plans to extend the zone with a golf course. No use doing government-approved torture in dismal conditions for the interrogators, right ?
As a consultant, I often work in banking environments.
In one of those, Internet access was not allowed from the desktop, but you could launch an Internet Explorer session which connected to a VM that allowed to go on the Internet - except you could download nothing because the VM had no access to your PC. It seems to me that this is the solution to that problem.
This solution is probably not easy to implement, I have no idea since I'm just a lowly programmer and not a sysadmin, but dammit somebody has found the solution, so it is possible. And knowing the bank in question, it likely did not cost an arm and a leg to set up.
So let's get cracking. Forbid everything from the Internet, create a sandbox environment that can access Internet, and this kind of problem is gone.
"taking it away from its peer-to-peer roots in the name of a browser-based client and in the hope it can add more services
and more bloat, and more useless "features", and some CPU-cycle eater that MS seems to have an endless supply of. Then, of course, it will be "integrated" with Office and IE (in the kernel, obviously), and end up in a WU mandatory high-priority patch that will tie everything in with your MS profile.
Thank God I'm on my way to Linux.
Pork is apparently a cause of cholesterol, and when you've passed the age the 40 things start to add up. At one point or another, you will have to adjust if you want to stay fit.
I intend to stay fit before my heart forces me to make that decision. That is why, in accordance with my doctor, I have removed Coke from my diet entirely, and almost entirely removed pork as well. My evening meals are now almost exclusively vegetable-based, and I have reduced my cheese intake by an order of magnitude (a difficult decision for a Frenchman, but it had to be done).
Live your life fully, by all means, and take advantage of your youth while you have it because otherwise where would the fun be ?
But pay attention to the signs. When the direction they take points to a negative value, I strongly suggest you sit back and take stock of the situation. Living on any medication is a nuisance, and diabetes - although manageable - is a very real threat. I believe it is best not to have to deal with such things, and I have made my peace with the consequences.
Which does not mean I don't have pizza every now and then. It means I only have it every now and then, once a month on average. And I avoid spaghetti carbonara entirely. I prefer having made those decisions before a doctor tells me that I have to.
2FA is you on your computer going to a web page that sends an SMS with a code to your phone, code that you have to type in on your computer keyboard to access the web site. I fail to see how your computer could capture the SMS and get the code and use it on its own. The procedure described a method to get your phone's IMSI code, but the article specifically and clearly indicates that it cannot be used to spy on your messages or calls.
So no, your computer is not going to self-2FA. Not without growing some arms to grab your phone and some eyes to find the SMS and the code it contains. If it does have those functional extensions, I would be very interested in the software that would make them accomplish such an act.
Personally, I only have wi-fi activated when I am using it to connect to the Internet. I can't leave it on like that or my battery will be flat in half a day. Funnily enough, using the 3G connection does not deplete my battery so fast.
As its immense money pile allows it to. Like every Internet-based company these days, it believes that it can redefine the law of any land by virtue of simply saying that things are like it wants, not like they actually are. Uber is starting to learn the limits of such behavior.
Contrary to most, jurists are experts at listening to arguments to better destroy them, and the law is not defined by an Internet company.
Still, Google (and others) have deep coffers and know how to use that to lobby and get the laws they want. So Google may be right one day, but I am personally pining for the judge who would take such declarations and slap a $10 billion fine for contempt of court.
Never going to happen, of course.
Alternatively the facial recognition neural nets will be trained to totally ignore glasses
I don't think that is possible. Glasses, by definition, cover the eyes and impact the shape of the nose, and that entire region seems to be critical in recognizing someone. Disregarding glasses means not analyzing that zone and that will likely render recognition basically impossible.
Until the day we have AI that can guess how someone looks without glasses, that is. Then we're toast.
Right, because criminals will immediately cease to try and get their drones into the prison anyway because of such a strong obstacle. Sure.
It's not like criminals have any IT-capable people available to, oh I don't know, replace the chip containing the zones ? Hack into the drone's innards and erase said zones ? Create an entire new OS that simply disregards that information ?
I really don't see that this is in any actually useful. The only people it will hinder are the honest ones that, by definition, should have no interest in flying their drone over a prison anyway.
I have a better idea : give a shotgun to one of the wardens and appoint him Aerial Defense Officer. Let him have a bit of fun and improve his marksmanship at the same time. Let's see the crims circumvent that.
Oh, so now there were actual facts ?
That's news to me, I was under the impression that it was all demagogic waffle and pandering to the racist knee-jerk part of the arguments.
Could you point us to one of those "facts", so I can learn ?
We're talking about Thomas Edison, right ?
Because Thomas Edison is world-renowned. As is Albert Einstein.
This Dr Ayyadurai guy seems to be world-renowned in his own little world. Kudos to him for inventing something he called EMAIL all by himself at whatever age it was, but I'm sorry, world-renowned he ain't.
We had user empowerment. We used to be able to install AdBlock and we would have no ads.
Now I install Adblock and I still get ads - the one you're paid to let through. That is a reduction in my empowerment.
So I uninstalled Adblock and I now use Ublock Origin which bloacks ads and hasn't sold out. How's that for empowerment ?
Agreed, Doctor Syntax. Y2K was absolutely not a hoax. I was just one of the thousands upon thousands of people who poured days and months of time over more than two years combing over code with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that business operations would continue after that day.
And I am certainly not the one who had the hardest customers or the most difficult code base to handle.
If Y2K was not a catastrophe it is because of that effort, the first ever made on such a scale.
I am proud to have been a tiny cog in that massive project that was definitely no hoax.
The logical endpoint of Admiral's idea is that if anyone doesn't have a "social media" profile* then they don't get car insurance....
Um, no. The logic, if you re-read the parts you missed in the article, is that first-time drivers can opt in to having their FB posts analyzed in the hope that their first-time premium will be lowered.
Nothing in this scheme has anything to do with established drivers because those already have a cast-iron reputation with the insurance companies (either good or bad, they have their reputation).
"Every time it starts and at regular intervals, the device sends an UDP message to the authentication server, containing device data, an ID number represented by the MAC address and a 36-character code. However, the cloud server does not verify the code, it trusts the device’s MAC address to perform the authentication."
They went through all that trouble to include a 36-character code generation program in the camera software, program the server app to recognize and accept it, then they decided not to use it ?
Could someone please explain the rationale behind that decision ?
"Here, we spent this much money on creating a somewhat secure dialogue between our server and our products, but nah, let's just accept the MAC address that can be spoofed and consider everything okay."
"Brilliant ! We can call it a day."
This is why IoT security is hopeless. Even when they make a half-hearted attempt at it, they just bungle it royally.
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