Posts by Pascal Monett 19448 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
It wouldn't be so effectve if programmers stopped downloading code to production servers without any good reason.
Saving bandwidth is less important than ensuring security. And if you think that getting the latest updates is worth compromising security, I'm sure nork hackers have you on their Employee of the Month portraits.
Why ? They'll be selling the heat, won't they ? So, there's profit to be made and, if you want to make money, you have to start by paying money. They've already done the hard part anyway : the heating process is up and running already.
This reflex of not wanting to pay in order to get something has to stop. It's not because you're a corporation that you have the right to government handouts and tax breaks.
25% of 725 million is 181 million.
$181 million is way too much for someone who has not been impacted by the issue that they are now involved in.
It is wrong. Just wrong.
An attorney is paid by the hour. If he's a good attorney, he gets to bill an outrageous sum, but he shouldn't get his fingers in a pie he doesn't deserve.
And if he was impacted by the issue, then he gets to submit a claim, just like everyone else.
It is time to put a stop to this nonsense.
I understand that racist web content should not be used in training data. I'm a bit less sure about pornographic web content, but I'll give that one a pass.
Now, if web content is neither racist nor pornographic, how exactly is it "problematic". What is the definition of "problematic" in that context ?
Could someone enlighten me ?
Correction : freedom of speech is paramount, except if you're dissing the Great Twitler.
What Musk still doesn't understand (and probably never will) is that your actions still have to correspond to your words in order to be credible.
Making exceptions to your own general rules and your credibility goes down. Make those exceptions to favor yourself and your close friends, and your credibility disappears.
His credibility has disappeared.
That is especially tru of encryption, which is why RSA encryption is so successful.
However, when a private company that has never published production code is hacked and its code is stolen, that is a rather serious blow against the security of its code because now the miscreants can find out how the whole thing was put together, which makes it easier to find loopholes and create code that simply hacks the result.
If I knew the code to Bing, I could write a patch that could finally redirect any call to Bing to whatever browser I preferred.
Damn, now I'm getting my hopes up . . .
Let's not forget that that vulnerability was of our own doing, with every "industry captain" hell-bent on having everything made in poor countries instead of building industry in Europe.
Between COVID and China, it looks like some sense has been knocked into a few decision-making heads.
Oh, of course there's the fact that, in order to sell product, you have to have it available - which is a tad more difficult when your production line is a continent away, out of your control, and has suddenly developed a severe case of notavailabilitis.
It would seem that, just like The CloudTM, it appears that local control is once again in favor. And the wheel turns . . .
The right to fee speech does not include the right to threaten others and never has.
Swatting should be illegal if isn't already, and the consequence should be hard time for the scum responsible. I fail to see what new law is needed to make that happen, I'm sure there are enough existing laws for that.
Online threats should bring legal action, with subpoena to the provider to reveal the origin. And death threats should be acted upon by the FBI or corresponding law enforcement without fail and without mercy.
Free speech is not an excuse. You can hate anyone you want, you have no right to threaten them.
Well good luck to them. I think Red Hat, of all companies, will recognize the customer's right to decide for himself, and not foist a cloud environment on people who have no use for it.
We're talking Linux here. I hope that that means that customers are intelligent enough to not go for cloud simply because everyone else is.
Then again, we're also talking human beings - worse, managers - so I'll accept that I might be disappointed.
Sounds like a beginner who couldn't be arsed to find out exactly how many loops were necessary so go for 16K, it'll surely be enough.
Not to mention that auto-appending to the cron job sounds like it should be anathema to me. Not a Linux admin (or an admin of any other OS), but I'm convinced that a job is supposed to be put in the cron list by an actual human who knows what he's doing, not as an auto-insert by some coder who looks like he's half-assing his way to the next paycheck.
Yes, I know that semiconductor fabs are immensely expensive and that we now have to ensure that when China invades Taiwan it will not cut us off from our silicon perfusion.
With that in mind, it still seems to me that money attracts money. None of those billions are going to go to a chip fab startup. It'll all be Intel, TSMC etc, in other words, it'll all go to companies who are already valued in the hundreds of billions.
You want to take advantage of this opportunity to start in the semiconductor business ? We like your gusto, kid. Why don't you start with a hot dog stand in New York ? Call us back in 20 years, we'll see what we can do.
Where public communications are concerned, it is my position that nothing should come before security.
The fact that security is not the number one concern when implementing a new layer of communication that is supposed to be open by design is a promise that, when things will go wrong (and they will, we all know that), it will be much more expensive and time-consuming to correct.
And frankly, telling me that an open infrastructure does not need to be hardened against Russian/Chinese/Nork hackers is just begging for trouble.
Um, no. The guy can find any religion he wants, posting classified documents on a Minecraft-associated server is not whistleblowing.
If you want to be a whistleblower, you send the documents to Wikileaks, or a reputable journal, along with a text stating your intentions and why those documents prove your act.
Leaking classified military documents to impress your buddies is not that in any way, shape or form.
This guy is going down.
Apparently you have it in for BPS (no, I've checked your comment history, don't even try to deny it). Would you mind providing a citation that might justify your online war against them ?
Not that I particularly care for either of them, but when I mount an argument against someone, I source my argument.
Please show us your source(s), otherwise you are just ranting gratuitiously.
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.
