Posts by Pascal Monett 19255 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Or kilobyte, in this case.
Had the sim failed just seconds sooner, he would have been a goner come Monday. Had this happened the week before, he would have been a goner come Monday. Had his superior left ten minutes before, he would have been a goner on Monday.
Sure, he might have made a wrong decision, but he got just incredibly lucky after that.
Good for him.
First rule of software vendors : it's not their problem.
Second rule of software vendors : if they do actually do something, you should be eternally grateful and kiss their feet whilst performing whatever acrobatics they deemed necessary to prevent them from too much work.
Third rule of software vendors : do as little as possible once everything is 80% working because, anything after that and they might be liable whereas, if you're happy with 80%, well everything's peachy, right ?
Geofencing via satellite, now there's a technical challenge. I would have thought that the only way to prevent users in a given country (aka Russia) from accessing the service would be to refuse connection to the identified MAC addresses of the equipment in question, which, of course, adds the issue of spoofing MAC addresses.
Maybe the better option would be remotely bricking the hardware. In that case, you'd better be sure of your target, because collateral damage will be a ginormous hot potato.
In any case, given Musk's pro-Putin stance, I'm guessing this issue will drag on for as long as Musk can avoid doing anything about it.
Because dongles cannot be monetized, whereas your biometrics can be compiled, collated and statistified, which allows for monetization.
Never mind that, if there is a cock-up (there will be), your biometrics will end up in a hackers' database and sold on the dark web. This is the Future, dictated by those who have the money.
And we all know the Golden Rule : those who have the money make the rules.
You're absolutely right, except you're wrong because today, developers have the habit ingrained in their skulls that production servers should download code from 3rd-party servers.
It's in the bloodstream now, there's nothing anyone can do about it - except the miscreants.
If they create enough mayhem, bloodshed and tears to make all CTOs and CIOs scream for keeping production server code under control, then we might get back to those hallowed times when an admin actually knew what was running on the server he was responsible for.
But, these days, the mantra is "move fast and break things" and, boy, how we are setting ourselves up to be broken . . .
"They both run the same iOS operating system, even if Apple claims that iOS and iPadOS are different; they are fundamentally the same."
Well, Apple, it's your fault for making one OS run on both platforms. You cannot tout your excellence in design and then pretend that that is not how things work.
Let's not forget corruption.
Heaps and heaps of corruption.
I honestly don't think there is a country in the world that can actually shape everyone's thoughts via governmental diktat.
It's just too much hassle and requires too much supervision. The Internet may let you think you have everyone under surveillance, but conversations outside the Internet escape you.
You cannot control everything.
Was he not aware that Poland is a NATO nation ? Apparently he did not grok that showing up there would place him squarely in the sights of US law enforcement and my, do they enforce.
Well, I'm sure he'll be able to find himself a cushy job when he gets out of jail in five years for good conduct. Or he'll move to Moscow and start his operations again with Putin's blessing.
So, one step further down the road to biometrics being used for the most mundane things.
Why does a club require you to give up your face to some datacenter that gives no guarantee that it knows how to manage that data securely and is not under legal obligation to do so ?
The sooner we treat biometrics with the same level of care and security that we treat financial data, the better.
Banks are under serious obligations to have the right to handle our money. Firms using biometrics should be as well, because I can't change my face if you foul up.
Hmm. Looks like just being a CEO is not enough to guarantee that you can do that job anywhere.
And, just out of curiosity, does a CEO of a financial institution have to follow the training and certify that he is aware of anti-fraud techniques like every other peon ?
Because it doesn't look like he is.
Not surprising that this character lied his way through, he was following the ex-President's brilliant example.
And as long as the OHSG is not cut down to size and put in an orange jumpsuit, characters like this one will continue to pop up and wreak havoc everywhere.
we regularly hear 'Even if imperfect, we prefer to have something 80 percent correct, [rather] than nothing at all'."
Great. Looks like Borkzilla has always been ahead of the curve after all.
So, this is the future of programming. This explains Crapita, Fujitsu et al. to a tee.
I am not reassured.
Between jailbreaking and locked ecosystem and now this, the iNazi has amply demonstrated its thirst for control of everything.
And, as usual, when you're addicted, you don't think straight. Apple is addicted to control, and it has now undermined the security and privacy of its users.
Congratulations for giving me yet another reason to never buy your products.
It is incredible how Google continues, year after year, to axe useful projects while making more and more billions, and yet cost-cutting is the name of the game.
And everyone who used the products that are being disemboweled somehow still haven't got the message : Google is not there to make your life better, it is there to make PROFITS.
Stop using its products. Stop validating this behavior by looking at the next new tool and saying "oh, I could use that !".
Just stay away from Google code. Google needs to be taught a lesson : when you're making all the money, you can afford to let projects continue.
Either that, or be true to yourself, Google, and replace the Board every two years. Via shotgun.
I totally agree. Nobody is going to put a Core3 Intel CPU in a "smart" doorbell. So there has to be a simple chip in today's tech that could do a job that does not require umpteen billion transistors if you know how to program it.
What might that spiritual successor be ? What chip is being used in all those damned IoT thingys that are being sold by the thousands every day (for the greatest joy of malware hackers everywhere) ?
This tech is going to be invaluable for the future of communication in space. Sending cat videos from the comms satellite orbiting Mars to the comms satellite orbiting Ganymede will be a cinch if this can be worked out. It'll just take time, as the authors of The Expanse demonstrated brilliantly.
No, not a happy read, but a clear indicator of why we got the Challenger disaster.
Rules were being ignored. During the heady days of the Apollo program, that would never have happened. They would have scrapped the flight, returned the Shuttle and too bad for the cost of the mission that would have had to be redone.
But Apollo was over. The cost of the mission, and its urgency, took prime consideration and the mission was ordered on. If there had been an actual failure of the flow pump, the Shuttle could have been destroyed on re-entry.
We came that close to not knowing about O-rings.
So, they're aiming to fire 88% of their "contingent".
Does that mean they're going to fire 88% of administrative busybodies ? And nobody has gone on strike yet ?
Wow. Talk about double standards. Google fires 25 people and it's headline news. A UK Gov administration is looking to reduce headcount by 88% and it would seem that that's just worthy of a throwaway line in one sentence of a 14-paragraphe article.
Where's the angst ? Where's the revolt ?
Oh, I forgot. It's administration. Bureaucrats do not know how to revolt.
Tesla is tanking (55% profit decline for Q1), but Musk parades some outrageous claims and promises and Wall Street ups the share price.
Intel has solid plans for the future, is realizing gains at a high level, but because one quarter lost half a billion bucks, Wall Street sends the share price down.
What a bunch of morons.
It would seem that intelligence is not his strong suit. You want to flee by plane and you bring a gun with you ? Way to go to pass unnoticed.
From the article, it seems obvious that this idiot was bungling his job, getting rightfully chewed out for it and, of course, decided to retaliate instead of cleaning up his act.
What made him decide to run for it is not clear, but getting caught simply because you improperly stashed a firearm speaks volumes about his lack of anything resembling the notion of risk vs reward.
That argument is only valid if every citizen has the choice between every ISP.
I very much doubt that that is the case anywhere, let alone in the Land of Monopoly that is the USA.
Anyone using that argument is just a humongous hypocrite.
It's only big because there are no subdivisions. Somebody is obviously a control freak and cannot stand the idea that his local empire be divided and his "power" be diminished.
So there's just one big blob of incompetence at the top, instead of spreading the risk and maybe finding someone competent somewhere else.
Of course they aren't.
They're not investors, they're gamblers. They want their fix, NOW (or soon, at the very least).
An investor is a person who wants to participate in a project, and is willing to put funds in it to bring it fruition, not to get a return in two years.
If the project is important, it could take ten years. A true investor knows that and is willing to take the risk because he believes in the project.
Today's "investors" are just selfish man-children who want their next lollipop for snack time. Long-term thinking ? Not their strong suit.
"one of the reasons the Land of the Free has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world"
That is not the reason.
The reason is that prisons are private companies who have primed the law to send them people that other countries would use rehabilitation programs to get back on track.
The War on Drugs is just one good excuse to condemn users to jail instead of going after dealers - there's more of the former.
Then you have police entrapment with "hookers" who are just there to entice men to commit, then get cuffed.
That is why the Land of the Free has the highest incarceration rate. It's a business.
