Posts by Pascal Monett 18221 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Bullshit. That decision had been made the day you planned to launch the product for free.
This has to stop. Nobody is fooled any more. The standard operating mode these days is :
1) launch a free product
2) observe how users flock to it
3) declare the free product unsustainable because "some users are using excess resources"
4) cut the free product and propose a subscription plan
5) profit !
We've seen this outcome a dozen times this year already. Stop pretending that you didn't know how it would end.
The first thing Musk did was to fire all responsible people. Musk has no ethics, and he didn't want to be bothered by that.
As for the cage fight, Musk has already proven himself to be a pussy and apparently needs to be examined by a doctor first. I think he might have a bit of pain in his lower back. You know, where he sits on all that bullshit he generates.
Yeah, the first one being Borkzilla's tendancy to fat-fingered configuration. The next being its long-standing tendancy to screw up.
I'd be interested in knowing when was the last time Interpol's servers were down. I'm willing to bet it was not this year, nor last year. Borkzilla can't last 90 days without an outage somewhere (and I'm being generous). That'll be really efficient for inter-governmental collaboration when their "secure" platform is so secure they can't log into it.
Yup. Former. As in, won't ever be a business leader again.
I would like those medical conditions verified, but in any case, there is no excuse for attacking hospitals.
That should be a capital crime. You got cancer ? Well you'll be treated in prison. If the phones work.
Seems to be a bit of a Pyrrhic victory to me. I thought the innovation of SpaceX was a reusable first stage. They might want to restart testing that part of their rocket.
So, that is proof that 1) the programmer didn't bother with actually checking inputs, and 2) zero quality control or even proper testing.
I would venture that this would be grounds for a serious dress-down, if not a pink slip outright. When you're writing code for expensive equipment, the least you can do is make sure your code is not going to risk breaking anything and that means testing, testing and testing some more.
Because if the telescope had been damaged, it could be proven that the code did wrong and that company would have been obliged to send a new telescope free of charge.
If that had happened, I'd wager the CEO would have suddenly been very interested in testing procedures . . .
You got yourself a nice, cushy job of doing absolutely nothing.
Must be mighty comfortable up there, eh ? I'm guessing you're already rich, so this is just more gravy to you.
Well, if ever you should find yourself with a slight urge to actually work, don't forget to create a commission to analyze whatever itches you and bury it under a twenty-seven page report with their proposals on the last three pages. That way you can spend your tenure requiring rewriting and clarifications and you'll leave as you arrived : useless.
It's lawsuit territory.
There can be no "reasonable" expectation of losses. They can go from insignificant to mind-boggling and anywhere in between.
It all depends on how good your lawyers are and how much better/worse the adverse party's lawyers are. Justice ? Eh, that's a theory.
TLDR : it's a crapshoot, and you're the target.
With all due respect to a long-standing fellow commentator, the fact that Disney has sodomized the notion of copyright in its favor in US law does not mean that all the little ones (aka everyone else) don't need that protection.
That copyright law does indeed need reviewing does not preclude using it to protect those who need that protection. And the default status of all Internet companies who clearly appear to define the Internet as their personal data repository needs to be changed as well.
One can have the balls to disagree with upper management, but it takes real courage to actually quit in protest.
Oh sure, he probably won't be long in finding something else, but still, this does not appear to be something that he has planned, it was a conscience decision and damn the consequences.
I admire that, and I fully agree with his position on this matter.
"It's unclear whether a Detumbler could simply be slapped onto an existing satellite "
If we're talking about space junk, I would hope that this Detumbler is supposed to fix on existing junk. A satellite that is still functional has attitude control, and thus doesn't need a Detumbler.
That said, Airbus hasn't said how it is supposed to get the Detumbler on the cubesat for the test, but I hope that said Detumbler will launch after the cubesat, to catch up with it somehow and latch on magnetically. If it can indeed orient itself, lock on target and basically dock, then it would be a massive success and we could start thinking about sending scores of Detumblers to help bring the junk down.
Of course, that sounds too good to be true, so . . .
Yes, that's what Borkzilla & Co have taught us after three decades of borking first releases. But back in the day of the 56K modem, we were all young and starry-eyed when faced with another new shiny, because new and shiny was all around and we all thought, surely the company wouldn't advertise a product that didn't work ?
Now we know that yes, a company can very well advertise a non-working product because "there will be a patch soon". Patch which may solve the problem, and might even do so without creating other issues - maybe (but don't bet on it).
So yeah, now we know to wait a few weeks (or even months) for the initial bug set to be resolved before rushing to purchase a new shiny. Because we've learned the hard way (well, for those who have learned, at least).
Stop right there. Beancounters don't save anything. They count. That's their job, and that's their limit.
Stop trying to give them more credit than they are due.
Savings are not made by beancounters. Savings are made by people who know the job, know the requirements, and know the vendors. They are the people who are best situated to know where to shop and what for.
Beancounters only have administrative guidelines, and those things only cost more money than they are worth.
Just check the comments here if you have doubts.
Congratulations. We're back to the judge who decided to grant companies the same rights as humans.
No. I don't care what you take into account, it is not right for a vehicle to slurp information from my phone. No vehicle needs data from my phone outside of my contact list so that can call someone while driving.
And that does not mean that the vehicle should keep that data stored while shut down. I grant it the right to slurp my contact list when I connect the phone and for the duration of the trip I take. When I shut down the car, it should forget the list because the next time I connect my phone to the car, it can slurp it back again.
That is my decision. If I don't want to connect the phone, there is no slurp. I do however recognize the utility of that connection, as long as it serves me. Once the car is shut down, it no longer serves me to have that information stored, so it should be erased.
Dammit, why it is so hard for those corporations to stop grasping every single byte of data they can get their mitts on ?
The reason we don't see Smart KnivesTM ?
Because we're seeing Smart everythings, and more of them every year. Watches, toasters, toothbrushes, anything they can shove data-gathering into (because that's what it mostly is), they slap "Smart" on it and job done.
The only reason we're not seeing Smart Knives is because of the risk of litigation when some numbskull does something stupid and then the next of kin complaines that the Smart wasn't.
And it would happen, if ever there was a Smart Knife.
Wow. The standards of legal action really have gone down since I was a kid.
Once upon a time, Big Oil was broken up to stop the monopoly.
Once upon a time, Ma Bell was shredded into multiple Baby Bells to stop monopoly.
(okay, the fact that, in the end, it didn't make much of a difference is irrelevant - the monopolies were carved into pieces, we can do that again)
Today, Justice is apparently content with a pinky promise to not do it so much in the future.
No wonder CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies think they own the country. They do.
Without supporting His Muskiness in any way, shape or form, one has to admit that the end result of automation, AI and robotics means that, one fine day, the only humans who work are the ones who will actively want to. Everything that needs doing will be accomplished by automatons, with defined procedures that have been refined over decades, then centuries.
I refer to The Expanse for a clear idea on how this could work : citizens, upon graduation, would decide if they wish to have a life defined by Basic (revenue, support, health care, etc.. I guess), or if they want to actually work for their subsistance and attain a career worth something.
That is one idea. I suppose there are a number of possible variations. But the point is : we're doing everything we can to work as little as possible. One day, that will mean that we don't have to work anymore.
So we might as well talk about it, I guess. Even though I would really prefer that a failure like Musk not be the one to champion the idea.
As much as it would be easy to rip in to Bugzilla's code once again, for once I have to credit the developers for checking that something that should never happen did (or did not).
I guess that was way back when they had actual engineers working on code, not today's "move fast and break it" kids.
Looks like ancient code is the best . . .
Once again, a tech behemoth with coffers that are filled to overflowing offers a free service only to find out that, damn, there are people who actually use it.
And so starts the backpedalling, soon to be followed by bait-and-switch tactics of now you have to subscribe.
You don't even have the luxury of saying you couldn't have known this would happen, Borkzilla. It's happen a dozen times this year already.
Bad Borkzilla. No cookie.
And again the problem is not removing a given popular app from government devices. The problem is how the hell did it get installed there in the first place ?
It's a government device. It should only have government-approved applications.
If you can't manage your device security upstream, then you have to manage it when it's too late downstream.
Governments seriously need to consult Fortune 500 companies (and mostly banks) on how to secure their devices. Then we wouldn't be subject to this clown show.
Why am I not surprised that Borkzilla is shutting down something that gave it valuable feedback and buzz on MS products ?
Feedback can be negative. Redmond doesn't like negativity. Redmond wants everyone to be positively enthusiastic about everything important Redmond does, like giving users a new Dark Theme that nobody asked for.
Or wait, did the MVPs ask for that ? That would be ironic.
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