Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
I have another solution : don't use it.
Instead, there is the old-school method. It's called bookmarks. In my browser bar, I have a Youtube folder. All the channels I follow are in that folder. At the bottom of the bookmark bar folder, there is an option "Open All in Tabs" (at least, there is in any proper browser). So, when I feel like exploring my channels, all I have to do is go to my bookmark folder, open everything I have chosen, and wait for the refresh (on a 1Gbps fiber line, it's okay).
YouTube recommendations ? I don't need stinkin' YouTube recommendations. If one of the hosts on a channel I follow recommend that I go look at another channel, then I go check it out.
Bah, humbug.
I'm thrilled that server farms are cooling their equipment more efficiently. That is obviously a Good ThingTM.
However, I do have one question : the amount of heat that needs evacuating does not depend on the manner in which the cooling is done. So, how is it that I am reading about economies ?
Granted, air cooling requires noisy fans and proper airflow, which is not always obvious to ensure. Liquid cooling is easier since the heat is leaving through a pipe, not just through the rules of thermodynamics, so it's a sight easier to know what you're doing, but in the end, there is still a fan pushing (or pulling) air through a grill, and that's where the cooling is happening.
Far be it from me to knock liquid cooling. I have been an active proponent of it for almost two decades (aka, before it became common), but the amount of heat to evacuate does not change, even the operating comfort does.
When I adopted liquid cooling for my first AMD Thunderbird, it made a world of difference. My home office was silent. The only noise left was the soft whirr of a pair of hard disks. It was astonishing, and I never went back to pure aircooling.
Nowadays, my home rig has watercooling on the motherboard, on the graphics card and, of course, I bought a CPU cooling kit with a ginormous radiator. So I have a 3-fan radiator for my GPU (which, in all honesty, never makes a sound) and a two-fan radiator for the CPU (which makes more noise, annoyingly), in addition to the chassis and PSU radiators. Still, I will never go back to pure aircooling.
But the heat is still there. It still needs to be taken away. The only advantage of watercooling (apart from reduced noise levels) is that you don't have to rely on iffy air thermodynamics. I do not see any other gains.
Hey, genius, if you had read the terms you could have avoided signing a contract that locked you in.
Instead, you just signed it and then tried to use your name as an excuse when it all went pear-shaped. At the rarified level of your circle, that is simply not excusable.
No pity here. Pay attention next time.
If there is a next time.
One day, one happy day, business is going to return to prioritizing stability over convenience.
I suppose that won't happen until all current CxOs have kicked the bucket and their noxious influence die with them.
But one day, we will return to a world where uptime is king, and change for the sake of change is anathema.
The golden rule is : if it works, don't fix it.
Very little is gained by adding a dark theme. Just my two cents . . .
As much as that may be justified, it still feels like a cop-out for legitimate journalistic inquiry.
With that kind of excuse, actualy journalists might as well just follow Twitter for the news (and I don't think that that is a good thing).
Let's imagine for a second that they actually are.
That still doesn't give them the right to enforce Chinese law outside of China. Not without a treaty between the USA and China and, these days, I really don't think that kind of treaty has any chance of becoming reality.
Someone can very well show up at my doorstep in France and claim to be from the FBI. He can even show me his card. He is not the law in France and any menace will be met with a curt "Out !" and that will be the end of the story for me.
It will be followed by a call to actual French police to warn them that there is a guy impersonating US FBI agents and going around threatening people, so that might not be the end of the story for him, but that's no longer my problem.
Of course, I have no more family in the USA to be threatened with, so there's that.
Even if China is actually sending proper law enforcement officers to try and get Chinese criminals to go back, that's not the way you do things. You negociate and extradition treaty and, once signed, you then submit extradition requests via the proper channels. But of course, that would mean China plays by international law, which is something it has a very hard time doing as soon as said law is not in its percieved immediate interest. That is how we get a nation acting like a schoolyard bully. And that including toward its own people.
But, my good sir, that is not part of the criteria.
You must be :
- expensive
- buzzword-savvy
- with plenty of (beginner) consultants
- and a legal contract that requires a legal department full of permanent lawyers to draft
- oh, and have an employee who is vaguely related to someone in government helps (a lot)
Having something that works is neither here nor there.
. . . but it's no big deal actually.
Sure, Borkzilla, it's not your data that is at risk, so "no big deal".
But your created a security environment which "could be abused".
Tell me, did you ever think of pitting your security against an official Red Team ? No ?
Of course not, silly me. That's what customers are for.
Oh really ?
So now on-prem is attractive again ?
Does that mean that all those C-suits are no longer basing their bonuses on moving everything and its dog to The CloudTM ?
Because I seem to recall a not-so-distant time when The CloudTM was the cheapest, most reliable way to go.
Looks like the beancounters have brought a cluebat to the board's meeting room.
About time too.
Also known as : hacker paradise.
And the company isn't responding to any questions, official or otherwise ? Well duh, the CEO is busy packing the suitcase with the contents of the cash register and bank account.
He has an urgent meeting in Madagascar, you see.
I always love those kind of stories. Nincompoops who don't realize what they have, movers and shakers doing their majik to go someplace "better", and everyone ends up wailing and gnashing their teeth in frustration because the land wasn't actually greener on the other side.
Reminds me of a customer of mine who had a perfectly serviceable helpdesk application with monthly reporting and an Excel overview with pretty charts so manglement didn't have to think too much. Some bright spark decided that JIRA was better (probably because he'd read about it somewhere and wanted to look like he knew what he was talking about). Of course, the company went to JIRA.
Goodbye monthly reporting with pretty Excel charts and proper little targets, hello big JIRA mess without any reporting of any kind. It would seem one member of the Board was sufficiently miffed to actually state in a meeting that if they had known, they wouldn't have gone through with it.
Here's me thinking : yeah, well maybe you should have enquired about what you were leaving and what the replacement tool could do to fulfill the need.
But hey, what do I know ? I don't have all those fancy diplomas and golf club affiliations. I just work here, guv'.
But that's the game plan.
Cloud operators do not like the free tier. It's a drain on resources and brings in nothing. It's PR fluff, which is fine but the goal is to tranform it into revenue.
And this is how Borkzilla is realizing the plan. Tie OneDrive and Outlook together, but of course ! It's brilliant, innit ?
Yes, for Borkzilla it is. Borkzilla gets to wax lyrical about how secure your files are and, oh by the way, given your activity in the past few months, you might want to splurge for some more OneDrive space because of all your Outlook mail that you get for absolutely nothing, honest guv'.
So, some free lusers are having a bad fur day ? Not a problem, there's another one born every second.
Security via obscurity. The age-old mantra.
It does work. Do you know where the nearest CIA safehouse is ? Of course not, you're not in the know and the building (or appartment) looks just like any other one. Impossible to tell at a glance. The neighbors might not even know.
But a satellite ? It may be sailing in the dark and hard to spot with the naked eye, but a radioastronomer can likely discover it and follow it without trouble.
A satellite is only hidden when it doesn't emit any signal. Unless it's a very specific satellite with a very specialized use case, it's likely that it is spewing radio waves of all sorts. Even if encrypted, those signals can be detected.
That being said, knowing that it's there doesn't necessarily tell you what it does. You'd also have to know about its orbit.
Commercial satellites generally don't move around all that much. A commercial company wants its hardware to last, and changing orbit is costly in propulsion fuel. A spy sat, on the other hand, has the task of gathering information, so if it has to move to get that intel, so be it.
In other words, if a satellite is changing orbit often, there's a chance it may be a spy sat.
But I'm sure that Chine, Russia and the US are all very aware of that already.
Well, if you had bothered making an OS that actually starts applications up in the same order every time, then this point would be moot, wouldn't it ?
But no, Windows does whatever the hell it wants every time, so obviously now you have a good excuse.
So what happened, these "high-performers" suddenly starting drinking heavily ?
It's flagrant abuse of procedure when someone who is rated so much better than average can suddenly get negative reviews. Either your review process is shite, or it is worthless, and the company that uses it is worthless as well.
In any case, if ever I am in a position to discuss contracts (not likely) and IBM offers me a staffing contract, I'll be sure to pull out the string of articles on El Reg that concern IBM's firing issues and shove them in its face.
After all, IBM can't pretend it's sending me its high performers anymore, since they get severly degraded on a managerial whim.
Is the poster child for "it works the way we want it" vs "it works the way the customers need it".
I'm curious to see who will win, the immensly weathly private company, or its Fortune 1000 customers.
I'm guessing that a single Fortune 1000 company can't hold a candle to the might of all them combined.
But that's just my guess.
Agreed, but the war on drugs is forgetting one little thing : the lessons of the Prohibition.
Therefor, they keep the war on, and keep the drugs illegal.
That's not the way it works. You want criminals out of the circuit ? Make whatever they sell legal. And controlled. And taxed.
Criminals hate taxes, so they leave. No soldiers required.
Indeed. A "verification" that costs six figures ? And needs a "final" verification, also in six figures ? I'm sorry, wasn't your first verification good enough ?
But of course, by that point the mark is desperate and the scum have got him by the short and curlies. I'm just wondering how many more times they could have strung him along before he finally twigged to the fact that an actual investment bank would only charge you a fifty for just about any verification there can be.
And actual banks only verify once. The verdict of that verification is final, even if you don't like it.
It's just sad to see that someone who managed his life well enough to retire with over two million bucks still can't just kick back and live the good life without being greedy for more.
If I had that kind of money I'd retire today and not worry about money any more.
""the pace of change is so fast that controlling it at the institutional level is just not possible anymore"
Well, and this is just a thought, maybe the institutional level didn't need to hop on to the bandwagon ?
If the Government was still working on mainframe with dedicated workstations on amber or green CRTs, I'm guessing that hackers, Russian, Chinese, Nork or otherwise, would be having a much harder time getting in.
Oh, and those pesky defense consultants with unlicensed Office versions would too. And we wouldn't be hearing so much about how TikTok is being "banned".
Now, I'm not saying that no change would have been preferable. By all means replace the CRTs with monochrome LED displays and a 1GB/s Ethernet connection, by all means. And upgrade the mainframe, or replace it with an AS/400 for sure.
But you didn't really need to get Windows.
They did not sink the Bismarck.
They brought the torpedoes that crippled the Bismarck's steering.
With the Bismarck going around in circles, the allied forces closed in and sunk her with cannon fire, the traditional way.
But of course, if the Swordfish hadn't crippled her, the allied forces would likely have had a much harder time of it.
This was not a question of broke, this was a question of administrative bungling.
It's always good to take a sharp knife to administrative issues that nobody has a hand on. Sends the cockroaches scurrying when their comfy nest is disturbed.
Now the telco, on the other hand, might have been the subject of a review from the fire department, i.e. a stern reevaluation of its usefulness and an evaluation of possible replacement candidates (which are likely not numerous).
Then again, it's a fire department. Not like they can afford to have phone issues for a week (or ten).
GMail allows you to recall a mail sent.
For about three seconds . . .
Honestly, if you are a major organization and still have, in this 3rd millenia, a mail server that blindly allows you to send CCs to more than a dozen mail addresses without a verification check or outright refusal without prior authorization, then I guess you have what you deserve.
It's been over a decade that we've all learned the hard way that Reply All should be practically banned, and sending mail to hundreds of external recipients at a time requires a process and overview that excludes any single operator.
But, as usual, the lesson still has to be learned the hard way.
Oh well, it's NHS. Par for the course, then. Carry on !
"Applying human analysis to the entire corpus of a package registry (~1.3 million for npm and ~450,000 for PyPI) just isn't feasible"
So the only thing the miscreants really need to learn is how to stay under a pseudo-AIs radar.
Simple ? Maybe not, but when they do get there, there will be plenty of time for mayhem before somebody twigs the coup and solves the problem. Then the miscreants will find another way.
Sword and shield, always.
And ?
Where is TikTok useful on a governmental level ? Are we also going to go into a tizzy about how governments are banning Angry Birds on their PCs ?
Why is it sooo important to relay the fact that governmental institutions don't want TikTok on their hardware ? Are we also going to hear about how banks are banning TikTok ?
Of course not, banks already have their hardware locked down.
So the lesson is : governments don't know how to lock down their PCs.
Am I supposed to be reassured by that ?
Ooh, so not fair ! You're blaming us for the exact same thing this other guy is !
Um, how can I say this. If you are looking at two lawsuits on two different continents with the exact same charges, you need to rethink your position.
Like, from Not Guilty to Guilty.
I'm sure that, with a trip to Putin's Russia and the application of a generous amount of dollars to a local general, you too can have your very own king-sized snowcone maker.
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