Posts by Pascal Monett 18911 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Allow me to protest that. China has no hold on El Reg, and Taiwan it its own country.
Do not play into Beijing's hand by confounding the two. Not on the Internet.
China can browbeat countries into no recognizing Taiwan, but we are not countries. We are individuals and we have the right to voice our opinions without Beijing's blessing.
Because when the system goes down, they are first in the line of fire for blame and furious calls to get things working - which only prevents them from actually solving the problem.
But it's comforting for upper management to be able to yell into a phone and, minutes later, see that everything is working again. They get the idea that they actually did something. Apparently, it doesn't happen to them very much.
All based in the US of A, which is fast becoming a mockery of democracy.
Get you EU data out of the grasp of the orange shitgibbons tiny hands and stop giving data to the US.
Yes, there will be a cost, but in the long term, it's indispensable.
I don't understand companies that behave like that. I'm a freelance programming consultant. When one of my customers calls to complain about the behavior of one of my programs, I'm damn well going to find out what's going on and what I can do about it. If I do find out that the customer's network configuration is the basis of the problem, I'm not going to lay blame, I'll just explain the situation and what I can do to fix it.
In an entirely different domain, my shower has recently developed trouble in getting hot water. The best I could get was a tepid shower. I called the artisan who installed the equipement and asked him to come over and and fix the issue. He was there the next day and, following my explanations, had already pretty much figured out the problem. He had come with a replacement piece of equipment but, instead of just replacing the faulty piece, he audited the entire bathroom. From that, we found that the hot water balloon was making the water too hot which, in turn, was dilating the joint in the shower's temperature dial which, in the end, was rendered incapable of delivering the desired temperature. We agreed that, apart from replacing the faulty piece of equipment, he would also set the balloon to a lower temperature that would avoid creating problems in the future.
What I want to demonstrate here is that a true professional is going to do his best to ensure that the customer is satisfied when he leaves. It requires dedication and knowledge of all the areas in connection to the one you're called in to work on, but such a person is priceless.
Companies are not priceless. What does that say about where we're going ?
One day, the White House is going to have to realize that it cannot dictate orders to the entire world.
There's 8 billion people on this planet, and most of them don't give a flying fuck about what some orange shitgibbon wants from a country they will never even visit.
It's time to stop the treadmill. Win 11 doesn't bring anything innovative, shouldn't exist and its hardware requirements are a figment of Redmond's imagination.
No more support ? Then stop paying.
That'll get Nadella's attention quicker than anything.
I'm thinking there's soon going to be some shareholders somewhere who are going to raise a stink when they're presented with yet another bag of billions thrown to something that has no ROI.
This is one case where I will accept that the selfish cunts put a stop to the project.
Apple is the richest company on Earth.
They practically print their own money.
Why can't they show the right example and create a program to exchange old phones for an acceptable amount (don't know what that is) and sell a replacement for the usual your-first-born-child-and-a-leg and demonstrate some true ecological prowess in recycling their own stuff ?
Oh, I forgot.
Shareholders.
Oh, you mean like the risk of a 1100% increase in yearly subscription costs ?
No. Security is ALWAYS forgotten. Because it gets in the way of selling product.
Until, oh shit, we've got to secure this thing because, otherwise, customers will complain. And if they complain, they might leave, so now security is important.
So, developers who warned us before, implement security on top of all the bullshit we made you do, because otherwise, you're fired.
More importantly, code needs to be obvious.
And I'm not talking about clear to code wizards. I'm talking about the new hire in a company that is tasked with making a change to a business-critical application.
If the code has been written by the kind of C++ wizard who thought that his one-line incredible unreadable function was a good idea, guess again.
You're not coding to show your skills. You're coding to solve a problem and to ensure that the next guy understands what you did and why.
If you expect the next guy to be a code deity, you have nothing to do with business coding.
The more your greed dictates your actions, the sooner companies will understand that managing their own servers is the best option in the long run.
So they have to over-provision the hardware ? That doesn't mean a surprise increase of 1100% in cost.
Hardware doesn't cost all that much, these days. One day, CTOs will wake up and stop listening to the siren chant. You're just helping them speed up the inevitable.
In the absolute, you're right.
Unfortunately, some organizations (NSA) and some countries (USA, China among others) do everything they can to hoover up every bit of data they can get their hands on, whether or not they have a court order authorizing them to do so.
So it is becoming useful, if not imperative, to control where the data flows in you own country.
Of course it had to be a secret review. After having publicly abandoned most of them to the Taliban for judgement by extreme prejudice, it wouldn't do to show that, on top of abandoning them, you also gave up their names through shoddy security.
Well done. They were "allies" as long as they were useful, after that they were nothing but cannon fodder.
The whole story of Afghanistan is one pile of shame on top of another.
Look, I am not ignorant of the past. I am grateful for all the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and drove back the Nazi fascists. Unfortunately, men of Eisenhower's caliber have apparently died out.
But hey, the USA has no right to dictate what companies in other sovereign states decide to do. This nonsense has to stop. The CIA is not entitled to rig elections in foreign countries (with the disastrous results that followed). The White House is not entitled to dictate what foreign companies decide to do.
The consequence is easily predictable. The USA is, currently, 340 million people. The world population is estimated at 8 billion.
Guess what matters most ?
The White House has less and less weight to throw around. The time of reckoning is approaching.
We went from mainframe and terminals, to PCs, to PCs connected to (a) local server(s), and we are now at PCs connected to remote servers run by someone else.
So, given that we're already hearing about "local cloud", how long is it going to be before we're back to terminals connected to a local server ?
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