Posts by Pascal Monett 19191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Eh, The CloudTM came and took away all the servers. It'll be wonderful ! we were told. No more admin worries ! they said.
They lied. There is just as much administrative headache with cloud servers, but it's worse because IT'S NOT YOUR SERVER ANY MORE.
And now, icing on the cake, you get to pay to obtain the recordings of YOUR MEETINGS.
Ain't The CloudTM just wonderful ?
I think the professional certification industry is rife with this problem.
And, to start with, I have a problem with an exam that is supposed to prove my knowledge of a specific domain of programming, and it's a questionnaire of the pick-the-right-answer type. And the questions are the hardest to understand, because those who created the questionnaire did their damndest to make the question obscure and open to interpretation. There's always the obvious wrong answer, then the easy to eliminate answer, and you end up wrestling between two choices that could be acceptable if the question included such-and-such as a given. If you really know your domain, you can pull it off in spite of the odd mistake, but I don't see that such shenanigans prove my competence as a Lotus Notes developer.
You want to know if I know how to program ? Ask me to write the code to answer a specific problem. Then test the code. If it runs and it answers the problem, then I'm good.
But of course, that approach eliminates 100% of the certification industry of today.
Pretty much when "existing" was replaced with "extant". You see that word everywhere now, especially when people want to seem educated. I fail to see what's wrong with existing. Especially since you can say that it existed at one point, but no more. How do you that with extant ? It exted ?
Bollocks.
Get off my lawn !
In the same vein but at a mucj smaller scale, I have a Synology NAS, a DS 420j. The manual says the hard drives are hot-swappable, but I don't trust it.
When I have to fiddle around with any of the four HDDs in there, I power it down and unplug it before doing what needs to be done.
I know that there is hardware that accepts hot swapping a disc drive, I just don't want to find out the hard way that I did it wrong. Since it's my personal NAS, doing that doesn't bother anyone but me anyway.
And that matters why ?
He's a nutjob building nukes, and the day he's got them, he won't be afraid of using them.
I just hope that NK is blanketed in spy sats watching his every move. The day he starts setting up a base to launch nuclear missiles, it should be destroyed without hesitation and without delay.
Drive more value ?
You mean extort more money.
Hey, customer, this cloud thing is dandy isn't it ? Be a shame if you couldn't take more advantage of it. So, how about doubling your budget ? You're sure to see a lot of benefit, trust me. What's that ? You can't double your budget ? But, it's The CloudTM ! Surely you see that using The CloudTM improves your business, right ? So have some more.
The only thing that can keep unbridled capitalism in check, eh Ma ?
Capitalism has its good side, no argument there. But capitalism is the golden path to monopoly, and that is where somebody with some muscle needs to step in.
Money is all good and well, and everybody wants some, no argument there, but those who have too much soon fall to the Dark Side of considering they're the only ones who have the right to have some, and everyone else should be paying them for the privilege of using their someone-else's-server that falls over at random intervals.
The good old make-something-that-works-and-they-will-come is eternally replaced by make-something-you-can-lock-them-into.
That's where regulatory pressure needs to be applied.
Preferably with a SWAT team and some think time in a private cell.
Oh honey, you had no relationship with Arm.
You had a relationship with people working at Arm.
Now you know what your relationship with Arm is : that which Arm lawyers accept.
And apparently, they don't accept nuthin'.
So maybe you should stop promoting the marvellous people at Arm, since Arm lawyers don't give a shit.
For robotics, maybe. For the rest, it's a milestone in component performance and proper programming.
There is no such thing as machine intelligence. There's the hardware, that has attained a level that is apparently sufficient, and then there's proper programming.
This wasn't done by a Microsoft development team.
So, this is McD corp selling hardware to franchises that is specifically locked down to not work properly all the time ?
What business school told them that was a good idea ?
Is that what MBAs are learning these days ?
No wonder the economy is going to shit.
They're not going to say the contrary now, that's for sure.
And obviously they will use any venue they can get their hands on to push out the positive message in order to help float the share value.
After all, it's not the leadership that will end up on the chopping block when comes time to "improve synergy" after the merger.
The countdown to layoffs has started. I'm guessing those concerned will find this "win" to be less successful than they would have preferred.
Yeah, you included censorship and obfuscated the origin of the software. So basically the developer took the code of an Open Source product, plugged in Big Beijing and sold it off as his own work. Without bothering to check copyright notices included in the code.
That's what I call a bad programmer.
Bollocks.
Face it, Borkzilla : you're not the #1 choice. Oh sure, you have desktop monopoly, one that you ruthlessly enforced when other choices were starting to emerge, but you simply will not be #1 where it counts now or tomorrow, the Internet.
The default browser is the user's choice, whether you like it or not. And if anyone needed proof you do not cater to those using your products, forcing Edge means task switching, because users are in their default browser and you are throwing up Edge.
That does not help to stay in focus. Words against acts, once again, and your acts betray you. Not to mention that this forcing Edge anyway you can is very much like the whiny ex that can't stop phoning you. Pathetic.
In any case, I note with interest all those Edge Deflector tools. I will be exploring their utility on my work laptop. Thanks for that tip !
The only reason computing has had so much of an impact on our lives is because, for the past fifty years, there has been every reason to improve on it.
From the room-sized behemoths that could barely calculate a square root per second, to the desktop computers that revolutionized how we work, to the Internet that revolutionized how we could learn and be informed (not always for the better), to today's computing devices that can do it all and be carried in a pocket (for certain values of pocket), computing has been on a necessary improvement curve, and with shining results.
But, with all this tech, what hasn't changed ? Videophone. Oh, technically it has, tremendously. But nobody likes it. They didn't like it when it came out, they don't like it today, and I see no reason to think they will change their mind tomorrow.
Why are teens (and now tweens) always typing on the screens grafted into their hands ? Because texting can be done at your rythm. You impose your little circle of privacy, respond when you feel like it. Zoom, or videophone, or even phoning, deprives you of that choice. You're talking to someone directly, you have to respond at the right moment. That is why all those texters are not actually phoning people all day.
Having an implant in your brain, going on the theory that that will actually be one day possible and 100% reliable, means good-bye to the simple ability to ignore something for a while. You don't want to answer your phone ? Leave it on the couch, go to another room for a minute, just ignore it, the ringtone will die at some point. You don't want to answer that blinking light in your peripheral vision ? Good luck ignoring that.
And what about sleep ? Will you be able to go airline mode and not be bothered in the night, or will you not have a choice and wake up groggy at 3 in the morning with that bloody blinking light in your peripheral vision ?
Whatever the level of tech of this brain implant technology, I'm sure there will be people who try, and I'm sure the majority won't.
A phone, for all its faults, is something you can turn off. Sometimes it feels good to be able to turn off.
Sure it is. It also puts the cable at the mercy of the weather, of drunken motorists, of kids with stupid ideas and of thieves with an agenda.
Yes, putting cables in the ground is much more expensive. It requires proper planning and documentation. It also removes a lot of possible dangers, and could maybe even help in case of Carrington events.
There are cases when it pays in the long run to do things the expensive way.
Eh, Boeing ?
"T-Mobile, without any authority from or contact with Kroll or its employee, transferred that employee's phone number to the threat actor's phone at their request"
No. Just no.
I don't care what the sob story was, the fact that T-Mobile accepted to do so means that it is T-Mobile that is guilty of handing out that data to the wrong person.
I just can't imagine why, in 2023, a communications company would still be able to do so. This is not a new kind of attack. There should be procedures in place preventing this from happening. And, if an employee ignores those procedures, he should be fired, because this is exactly what the procedures are meant to prevent.
T-Mobile, you are responsible for the proper management of your customers' data, and that includes their SIM data.
You utterly failed to uphold your responsibility.
If I were a T-Mobile customer, I'd be reviewing my options for leaving.
As a freelance consultant in Luxembourg I get to talk to quite a few people in the upper echelons. Just yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a business owner who told that he had dropped VMware entirely. Among the things he gave as reasons were :
1) as a business partner, he has to recertify every year (money for VMware), he has to give a certain amount of referrals every year (money for VMware), and yet he still has to pay for his application license - no freebies for business partners
2) the latest version of VMware must be installed on (very) recent hardware - if your server is five years old, VMware won't install
As a result, he is now using an open source (free) product that works just as well, is less complicated to configure and use and doesn't pout in the corner if the CPU isn't the latest and greatest.
I'm thinking that VMware may have some issues in its future if it can be so easily replaced by a free product.
If I were a Tor user, I would wholeheartedly agree.
Something that keeps dishonest troublemakers out of my way and let's me surf in peace ? I'm all for it.
And I really like that they are taking pains to clarify that it is not YAFMS (yet another funny money scheme). Funny money has nothing to do with plain old integrity, and that integrity is what the Tor developers are trying to keep.
I salute them ->
Completely agree with your point. As already said above, this is in exactly the same ballpark as Internet providers pretending to offer unlimited access, but complaining when you actually use it.
So <1% of users are using >35TB of storage. And ? You said "unlimited". If your business plan is not capable of handling that, it's your failure.
Especially since you are "offering" that plan to professionals. Guess what, there are professional video makers, and video takes up a lot of space. And even if they are not professional video makers, you said the plan was unlimited. Your terms.
Dropbox is decidedly a useless company. They don't know what they're doing, and they don't know how to do it.
Doesn't matter, they'll be gone soon enough.
Company signs agreement with employee to let him go and start another company in the same business, then sues.
If they did sign that agreement, why did they sue ? And if they did not, why is a lawyer saying they did ?
Is this another case of "well, we did agree to that, but this is different" ? - aka : another bloody waste of time in court ?
Honestly, if I were the judge I would throw the whole thing out on principle. You waived your right to complain, so what are you doing here ?
Limits to its budget ?
For an organization that has been pissing money away for nothing since at least ten years, it's budget is obviously not limited enough.
If they had less money to fool around with, they'd have to do something actually productive with what they had.
Then they could build on it bit by bit, instead of having all these massive ideas that end up going nowhere and costing everything.
We all know that cloud = someone else's server.
In this case, it would seem that someone else's server had an issue with restoring a proper job list after a connection had dropped (sounds like something that should have been tested properly).
That looks like there isn't sufficient job identification when printing. If the printer knew which job it was printing and if each new instruction was accompanied by the proper jobID, then if a new jobID was suddenly sending instructions, the printer would be able to refuse and set itself in error status.
Sounds like that is a precaution that was not taken because why think of making sure the printer knows what it is printing ? The CloudTM never goes wrong, right ?
So, if I get this right, if you're under 18 in the UK you can wreak havoc and blackmail people and you're free until the trial ?
No computer lockdown ? You can just carry on blackmailing people ?
Is there something that is keeping that soon-to-be criminal from continuing to make other people's lives miserable ?
The article is not very clear on the end result. I'm guessing rapid unscheduled disassembly.
And where did the remains fall down ? The Yellow Sea ?
And are we sure that there was no flying laser in the vicinity ? That unexpected 3rd-stage snafu could very well have been the result of a bit of coherent light interference with the 3rd stage envelope, no ?
Even if the Biden administration tightens the rules even more and nVidia loses the chinese market, it's rolling in dough anyway. It'll just make less and it has an official excuse for why. Not it's fault, had nothing to do with it, etc.
It's financials will continue to look good and, hopefully, that means its employees will remain employed (although nVidia is not IBM on that point).
