Posts by Pascal Monett 19106 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
I am relieved to see that there is at least one voice of sanity at the political level of this debate.
Much better than having no one to counter the shrillness of Hillaryzilla, or the abysmal stupidity of all the others.
Will it be enough ? Time shall tell.
Of course it is. Microsoft is stuffing it down as many people as it can, forcing its download and pushing "critical updates" that continually reorient people towards it.
And you know what ? It is still at less than 12% of market share as of December 2015. After having started admittedly strong in August 2015 at over 5%.
So that is a 7 point progress over 4 months.
For a product that is free.
And all you need to do to get it is acknowledge one of the many, many adverts Microsoft is pushing at you - adverts that you practically cannot ignore if you wanted to.
By all rights Windows 1 0 should have over 70% of market share right now. Every clueless user of Vista, 7 and 8.x should have fallen over themselves in their rush to get a free update that, reportedly, makes their PC work faster.
Instead, less than 12% market share after five months.
So you go crowing about "fastest adoption rate ever", like your kind has been doing for every Windows release since 98.
The truth is, people are not flocking to a free product. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Would it be possible to use those VMs for secure browsing ? If they're not Windows, it should cut down measurably on the risks taken when surfing, no ?
I like VMs, but a Windows VM is still Windows, even if it is a VM. A VM that is not Windows would be like the ocean to cross for a lemming - and I would feel that much more secure in this wild, treacherous environment.
Of course I could also use a Linux image, I know, but for the sheer thrill of it, I'd like to imagine using an industrial compressor to crack Internet walnuts.
The image included contains a bewildering amount of little blocks, but each block represents a physical handset model, not an OS version.
The beginning of the article clearly states that two-thirds of Android devices run either one of two OS versions, so that image should actually be two big blocks with whatever is left taking up the slack.
Except that I image it is quite difficult to know exactly what the rest of the situation is.
I think java is going to need more than just "a little push" to be gone.
It's everywhere these days, in your DVD/BluRay player, in your effing "smart" TV, and in a bunch of PC applications that continue to be used today.
Until the infatuation with java stops in the offices of consumer industry, we will lug that millstone around with naught to do but complain.
Easy to say.
The crux of the problem is that hospitals are a very costly business, and it is viewed as more important to have competent staff than it is to update computers. That means that the budget is seriously constrained and tools are used as long as they appear to function - EOL dates be damned.
Find me one hospital that is not understaffed with most departments not suffering from insufficient budget and you will have found a unicorn.
Unfortunately, the scum that take advantage of these institutions will provide a costly lesson to everyone - who survive it. One can only hope that some of those scum will find themselves in a hospital when another scum locks everything down for money, and that the scum on the hospital bed will live long enough to personally experience how unfair that is for all innocent people.
IT in hospitals is in for a rough and bloody ride, no doubt there.
Is there a kilo missing there ? For 60k+ cores, it wouldn't be unreasonable to use 2.5 kilowatts during calculations - at least it would seem very reasonable to me for that number of chips.
The most expensive Intel chip (Xeon E5-2670 v3 I think) is rated at 120W thermal dissipation. It has 12 cores. That makes 10W per core. Scaled up to 64000 cores, that is 640 kilowatts.
So are we really talking about a mere 2.5 watts ? Not even enough to boil water, I'd wager. If that is the case, then count my mind blown. And even at 2.5 kilowatts, it would still be mightily impressive.
It is not "permitted" to. It is technically capable of.
Bullying is not permitted either, but you have to catch the bully in the act before you can make it stop.
Here, it's the catching that is extremely difficult, thus the ability of the software to get away with it.
But it is not permitted. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
I thought Valve was better than that. I am disappointed that someone had to go and actually perform the hijack in order to get Valve to move on it.
That was a serious bug. Valve can be happy that the guy didn't post something truly disgusting or horrifying, or simply malware. Chances are, if some true scum had found out, Valve would be publishing meek excuses for having riddled x thousands of gamer's PCs with the latest-harddisk encrypting malware. Methinks that would have been a much worse thing, and this guy alerted them to exactly that fact.
When someone is nice enough to alert you to a problem that serious, you get fixing the issue, you don't ignore it. Shame on you, Valve.
I salute the performance in political absence of logic. Touching on individual data interception and bulk data surveillance in the same speech without anyone getting a clue is a major success over the eternal enemies of politics : Intelligence and Logic.
Well done Mr. Hague, continue like that and you'll persuade everyone to impose backdoors in encryption schemes yet !
Oh good. Now can someone please explain why SAP thought hardcoded kernel users was a good idea in the first place ?
Because that is something I'd really like to know. Hey guys, we're making this really complex and hard-to-configure enterprise software application that will be available over LAN, WAN and wireless. Why don't we include a hardcoded kernel user to make sure we can always debug a client installation ? After all, what could possibly go wrong ?
So now we not only have the malarkey around biometrics to contend with, but soon we will also have the corporate garment you have to wear to access your work zone. And said garment will be something you have paid for, but the company will put its stamp on it. And it will be the thing you wore on your first day at work, because obviously. You will be forced to have that garment every single day for the rest of your career at that company.
Else, even better, the company can just hop over to your house with a portable thingy and take control of your entire wardrobe. Sweet ! Isn't The Future just peachy ?
A badge has many advantages over any garment : it is easily and quickly washed, it is small and therefor mainly discreet, it imposes nothing on individual clothing preferences and it does not absorb odours. I think that last point is the most important one.
Not only do the miscreants hassle innocent people and destroy their data, but this scumware risks helping the US Government message on backdooring encryption. Of course, that is not the solution to the problem, but since when has that stopped a politician from pushing a point ?
"They" are not the ones tracking you. The app on your phone is snitching on you, to a person who has zero authority to send citations.
Since it is the phone doing the snitching, if it is off, no snitching can happen. And yes, we've all heard about how the FBI can turn on the microphone of a switched-off phone. We're not talking FBI here, just some Internet scum.
Intelligent Internet scum.
I do believe that flight has traditionally been more strictly controlled than driving. When a plane crashes, there is always an inquiry. Full examination is made of all the debris, and a lengthy report is written to establish the cause and possible procedures, or changes in procedures, to mitigate said cause in future.
When a car crashes, if no one is injured it is generally self-declared to the insurance. If the car is damaged enough, an "expert" will be dispatched to put a price on the repairs, but he won't be there to find out what happened - that is not his job. Only when people have been severely injured or killed is there a more thorough investigation, but that practically never results in instructions to car makers to change this or that. It is just an official record that this many people died because car crash.
So I find it perfectly believable that autonomous cars will, in time, not require a person to physically capable of driving, or even have a license. Not immediately, but there will be a time in the future where people will only learn to drive as a hobby, an eccentric fad, when everyone else is just driven everywhere by Johnny Autobot.
I checked out your link. I take one quote from it : "it can give you big success if you manage to tick a lot of boxes and get a little bit lucky.”
Seems to me that that is par for the course in any domain. If big successes were commonplace, the notion of "big" would just be pushed higher.
Now, far be it from me to say that mobile is no more difficult than any other area. It seems indeed that success on the mobile platform is tied to Apple itself heavily promoting you, and good luck getting that far.
But to consider that not having many "giant successes" as a yardstick for difficulty seems a bit naïve.
The moral is never do it, period.
Don't say "unless you really know what you're doing". Cowboy developers are always certain that they really know what they're doing until it blows up in their face.
Or yours, if they're not there anymore and you're left holding the candle.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Google is a mighty behemoth on the Internet, no doubt there, but it is not a hard disk maker - yet. It therefor relies on the disk makers to get its storage products.
The disk makers have the imperative to be profitable in order to survive, and that profitability is getting thinner and thinner every year. If the disk makers decide that they cannot risk it, they won't and Google will just have to go buy existing disks.
Or it plops money on the table and creates the Google disk. That would be Google doing "as it pleases".
In any case, the number of Cloud Service Providers is irrelevant. They all buy disks, they cannot not buy disks and they're not going to change how disks are made simply by pouting.
Just how a purely cosmetic change destined to enhance consumer lock-in provide in any way a counter-point to said arguments ?
Were the disks of larger capacity ? Faster ? More reliable ?
Don't think so. The point is irrelevant from where I sit.
I think that the basis of this article's comment on education is that school is a place where things are learned by rote. From my experience, I do not think that we are doing nearly enough to teach children to think for themselves. What we are doing is cramming a large pile of data concerning various domains down student's throats and hoping that all that data will sift through the brains and somehow result in intelligent people.
There are times when it is good to test knowledge in isolation. If everyone just becomes a terminal for a Google search, we're just moving the issue to another slot.
I do believe we need to modify the scholarship curriculum to make our young, upcoming adults have a better grasp on the realities of life in general, and business in particular. One thing I strongly believe we should put some emphasis on is the notion of patience. It takes time to get good at anything, and when I look at people around me, at all ages I see people wanting results immediately and, if none are forthcoming, they just drop it and move to something else. That is not an attitude that brings results, it is an attitude that brings frustration and worse when people are stuck in a situation they cannot escape.
The first thing that needs to be done is re-educate our youth to understand that Dancing With The Stars, The Voice and other shenanigans are not a path to success. It takes years to become proficient in any domain, anything that makes you think otherwise is a lie. Once we have re-established that basic truth, we can get them back on grinding their intelligence because they will understand that they have no other choice if they wish to succeed.
Then we can start working on accepting difference, and the right to disagree. Hammering that home will inescapably create people who are able to exchange and thus learn from one another in a much more efficient manner and that will benefit all of us in the long term.
Finally, we need to instil the notion of the right to fail. Nobody succeeds on their first try, therefor one should not make fun of someone who fails. Failure is the best learning process, because the result is unavoidable. Teaching children to not be ashamed of failure will help them concentrate on why they failed instead of just brooding over the fact that they didn't succeed, which will speed up solving the problem and turning failure into success.
Learning how to Google search is something students pick up on their own, no problem there. Learning how to interact with people better than a caveman is something some people never learn. Let's start there and work our way up.
Sir, you are apparently under the impression that some people choose to not update their Androids. Although I am sure that there are people who do so, I do believe that there is a fair amount of people who do not have the choice because their phone is locked by their carrier.
So what you are actually saying is "perhaps some carriers should take the finger out and get patching".
If your stuff is important, then the onus is on you to make sure it is available. Need to send your Tax Returns ? You photocopy the document, or scan it, and send the original. The copy is to be properly filed so you can find it back if necessary. It is that mechanism that people just completely forget about when they sit in front of a keyboard. The Cloud is NOT a replacement for that procedure, it is an additional precaution. One that is only as good as the service offered.
Until this kind of thing happens. The lesson, unfortunately, can be very painful.
As for PC World's so-called "backup", it never failed - it was never useful in the first place. That is also something she should have checked once in a while. The dates of the latest backup. If she had done so, she would have noticed that PC World does not offer a backup service, but a copy service. That might have tipped her off sooner that she needed a proper backup solution.
Mr. Grove is basically responsible for a number of joys - and frustrations - in my life. Not to mention the hours wasted in leisure. And the fact that he was a major force in creating my entire career - without him I'd have probably ended up an accountant.
So thank you, Mr Grove. Thanks to you I was able to make my life something I appreciate very much.
That happens because most companies do not take the time to properly audit their procedures and do not set the proper policies.
Not to mention that most companies rarely have personnel competent enough to do the job in the first place.
Banks, however, do not have the luxury of such an excuse. Not having PCs locked down and proper policies in place in simply shoddy IT practice for financial institutions in general. It's not like they don't have the money for it.
Dear God in Heaven, do I wish that were true.
Security in SMBs is only as good as the technical know-how of the CEO. If he fancies himself a programmer, or if one of his buddies showed him a Word macro that reveals the picture of a flying pig and he found that funny, you can kiss that notion adieu.
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