Posts by Pascal Monett 18239 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
This is a case of "I'll believe it when I see the body".
The cancerous, leeching parasite has dragged itself back from the brink way too many times for me to trust this at face value.
If the Lizard Men are controlling the White House, they're doing it from SCO HQ.
Maybe, maybe not. This is the Universe we're talking about, and this news proves that we are far from knowing all about it.
And just think, if the Milky Way was hiding a few hundred galaxies, maybe those could be hiding a few thousand more.
In any case, thank God for scientists painstakingly going over endless reams of data again and again in order to extract the very last ounce of data.
Well done, boffins and boffinettes. I salute you.
The very first phrase in the Bitcoin wiki on this subject is : "A brainwallet refers to the concept of storing Bitcoins in one's own mind by memorization of a passphrase. As long as the passphrase is not recorded anywhere, the Bitcoins can be thought of as existing nowhere except in the mind of the holder. If a brainwallet is forgotten or the person dies or is permanently incapacitated, the Bitcoins are lost forever. ".
My first reaction to that was Hoy Cow, how more useless can you get ?
If someone steals my Visa, I can have it blocked. If I lose my account password, I can go to the bank, prove I'm myself and get another one. If I lose my Internet access, I can go to the bank. With real money, there is always a fallback option.
This ? A knock on the head and your "money" is gone forever.
And you can't even light a cigar with it. Pff.
I think that any ad with a size over 80Kb should be banned. The html in the pages I read rarely goes over 20Kb, having 4 times that for ads should be largely enough.
I would welcome a browser extension that only downloads 80kb of ads and not a byte more. If all the ads in the page can't fit in, too bad.
That would kill almost all flash thingies in one stroke.
Now THAT is the right kind of approach. No molly-cuddling, no pretty please, no endless collection of second chances.
Where security is concerned, I totally subscribe to that. Enough with the kindergarden view of connecting things to the Internet.
I hope the words will be followed by actions.
It is only just that they get some misery out of all the shite they think they have the right to fling at us.
I have a solution for this situation, which I have already outlined in the columns of this memorable site. It is called separation of powers. At the moment, ad creators have complete control over the ad. They build it the way they want it, and shovel the end result to the channel for distribution. Thus, they have the power to make it as annoying/vicious/fullofmalware as they want.
I propose that ad agencies put a stop to this by creating an ad submission environment in which ad creators will only be able to submit images (eventually a video), and set up a script containing only commands from a given set of options. The ad agency would then check the script for any fraudulent commands, build the ad and serve it.
In that fashion, ads served by a given agency would always be built by that agency and the reputation of that agency would be made following what behavior it allowed in ads it served. Thus, agencies would (hopefully) compete by being graded by customers, while the public would bask in a world where ad blockers would only be used to block ads from agencies you wouldn't like.
In my view, everybody wins. Except for the scam artists, of course, but I'm not shedding a tear for them.
The Tunguska event was quite a big blast, but it did not kill many because it happened above a (very) sparsely-populated area - which is probably why it took a decade to get the first recorded expedition to find out what happened.
Interesting idea, and strategically valid, I do believe, at the condition that the owner is the only entity that can give it the marching orders. But that is an issue for the spymasters to resolve.
The real issue is that orbits degrade. If you want a loitering anything, you need to include the necessary fuel and exhaust ports, plus comms and telemetry to know how high it is, how fast the orbit is degrading and when and how long the burn needs to take to recover an optimal amount of time before the next burn.
Given that there is currently no satellite in existence that can maintain orbital altitude on its own (even the expensive telecommunications satellites that are very valued by their owners and would certainly benefit from such technology), I'd venture that, if Western economies with their ready access to best-level physicists and boatloads of money do not include such tech, I highly doubt that the Norks have the brainpower, not to mention the resources, to do it on their lonesome.
But hey, ingenuity knows no bounds, so I'm willing to be surprised.
Um, no. I'm not a physician, but I'm certain that no fusion reactor Man can make will turn Earth into a star. We might be able to return it to the molten slag state it started in, but we have nowhere near the mass, nor the hydrogen required to make Earth sustain fusion reactions in its core.
Personally, I admit that there will be mistakes - to think otherwise wold be foolish, given Man's history. I also think that a broken fusion reactor will simply make one spot rather hot for a bit, and that should be it.
Maybe we should always build them underground ?
No, Netflix created their software and built in redundancy because upper management had made the decision to put the money in it, probably because they decided, after analysis, that it would cost them more in the long run if they had a service that fell over every other week.
Best practice is hardly the reason for doing things when the accountants hold the purse strings.
Enterprise-grade, except memory management and automatic failover are conspicuously absent.
So it's more like piling sub-par software on a platform that can fail for several continents after a wrong DNS command.
So it's totally Microsoft-grade quality, then.
So, my future phone is to have Cortana/Siri locally, check my face/fingerprints and decide if I can use it, maybe even decide to forward parts of my conversations automatically to some "interested" 3rd-party.
All this just so people can continue their incessant jabbering whether or not there's anyone around to listen.
Humbug.
Wait a minute, every single example I've seen, or heard of up to now, of a learning system was specifically trained to learn in one domain.
I have yet to see a machine that can learn chess without any programming, then learn backgammon, then move on to learning knitting and finally learn how to plan and build a wall. Of course, said computer will need arms, at the very least, in order to actually do something, but I think that will be easier than the learning part.
Indeed. If the future is to be that robots do the work, then the notion of economy will have to take another definition and humanity will have to transition from "working" to "occupying themselves" or "pursuing personal interests".
An optimist would say that Humanity will finally have time to become better, more intelligent, more understanding. People will work to improve themselves, to advance knowledge, or develop artistic skills. Society will be a cornucopia of intelligence, communication and understanding.
A pessimist would say that, instead of working, Humanity will just sit in front of a screen all day, lying on its ass watching inane soaps or some other drivel while scarfing the future equivalent of chips. Communication will be limited to SMS's full of LOLs rapidly typed out in the tweetroom of all followers of whatever they are watching alone but together by the magic of connectivity. When the inevitable despair sets in, a call to the psychbot will help get them well enough to restart watching the lolcats.
Personally, I would prefer the first scenario, but one thing is for sure : one day, robots will be doing all the work. That day everyone will have to make a decision as to how they want to occupy their time.
And well it should be. You do not roll the dice on the lives of people that go beyond the atmosphere, alone and without even the possibility of help. If you're sending them that far away, you make damn sure that they can come back, that everything has been foreseen and accounted for, and that a working, dependable procedure is in place in every case.
And when they do come back, you go over every bit of data with a fine-tooth comb to make sure that nothing unforeseen happened - whether or not the result was successful. You do so to ensure that, the next time, the crew will have 100% of the information they need, and 100% of the available chances of survival.
It's called doing things right, and when people's lives are on the line, you don't do it any other way. When that is not done properly is when things like Challenger happen. Apparently you'd want that to happen more often. Well I don't. The Shuttle fleet was end-of-life, continuing to use them would have been criminal. The absence of replacement is Congress' fault, not NASA. Go blame them.
My car is in my garage. When not there, either I'm in it, or it's locked.
Why do I need to know how the engine works to ensure that it is protected ?
I agree that it is good to know how the lock functionality works, but it's not like you can tell the garage to install something else if you don't like it.
Which all goes basically back to the things Cloud is suitable for.
Scaling workloads : yes
Ensuring privacy : no
If you work with sensitive data, then you have to keep that data where it is secure. Those companies that made that choice were right in not looking at the technical aspect because that aspect is not pertinent to the decision.
I don't think that the statement itself is wrong, there are big companies that do exactly that - but those big companies have high-level management that make the decisions and then, when it has become corporate policy, no one goes against it.
What we have here is the prospect of capable people eventually being found and hired as middle management at best, then being continually overridden and denied by the same clueless upper management that is partly responsible for the current situation in the first place.
Because I don't think those project managers and architects are going to be hired as directors, do you ?
I have a NAS at home, and I used to pester every time I had to open a folder on it until I removed Windows Search and started using Everything Search.
Now my NAS is as fast as a local disk.
Not only does Windows Search take ages to find anything, but it also prevents basic file directory reading to proceed efficiently.
No matter, I will be moving to Linux. Win 7 is my last Microsoft OS.
I feel your pain. My associate was singing the virtues of SSD performance until, one day, the thing just died out of the blue. Took two days to get a replacement for his laptop.
He doesn't sing the SSD song anymore . . .
That being said, HDDs could be treacherous as well. I remember trying to get data off a failing one, only to find that every file I recovered was corrupt and unreadable.
Thank God for backups.
Weird, does that mean that 93% of the customer base doesn't care ?
Because if they haven't left by now, they won't be leaving because of the hack if/when they do.
This is the problem I have with these grand statements. If TalkTalk customers had really lost faith, then it would be more than 7% leaving it, it would be more than 50%.
But these days, anything that is over 5% is treated like a major disruption. Meanwhile, it seems to me that TalkTalk will not go bankrupt anytime soon. So it's business as usual, with a slight shift in figures.
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