Posts by Pascal Monett 18221 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
I know that feeling.
I once came to work at customer site, turned on the laptop and couldn't get a network connection. I was sure the WiFi was working, so I called the Helpdesk (oh, and I knew the guys).
Helpdesk drone came over and plugged the Ethernet cable back in.
I have never felt so ridiculous.
I bought him a croissant for my sins.
He deserved them, obviously.
It is managerial duty to oversee that helpdesk contacts go where the appropriate resources are. This one failed to do his job.
I hope he liked getting woken up.
I'm also pretty sure that, after a day or two, he finally updated the helpdesk phone roster.
That said, I absolutely agree about personal/professional phone difference. My customers have my professional number, which is available from 8 to 19.
My personal number is none of their business.
Of course.
Meta has done the ultimate in PR : make great announcements, then act within reality.
And I just love how the locals are wondering if Meta will keep its 15-year activity promise.
Hint : it won't, and you will be screwed.
The only way to ensure that multi-billion-dollar corporations keep their word is to include astronomical penalites in the contract if they don't.
Otherwise, they just prance away as soon as they consider that they have used up their benefits on site.
I still don't understand why IPv4 + NAT wouldn't work.
Huawei has 18 regions ? Each region could use the full IPv4 range and, with NAT translation between regions, business is done.
IPv4 + NAT scales to any size you want. IPv6 seems to me to be just an administrator's excuse for a good idea.
So Redmond has lowered its requirements in the face of its dismal performance in order to shovel its shitware to more poor, unsuspecting users.
How unsurprising.
There is nothing in Windows 11 that requires new hardware. Anything running 1 0 can run 1 1, aside from Borkzilla's stupid shenanigans.
Redmond still hasn't understood that the days where it could push everyone to upgrade are gone. Today's entry-level hardware is capable of running Windows and Office - not quickly, for sure, but those who buy entry-level hardware don't do it for speed.
Somebody at Redmond should create a nice Excel chart with the speed at which each new version of Windows has been adopted since XP. Then someone should bang some heads together to get the Board to think about what they've been doing wrong all these years.
Oh, who am I kidding. The Board ? At Redmond ? Think ?
Never gonna happen.
When have you ever seen that clown back down from whatever bullshit statement he's ever made ?
He'll "correct" a map with a Sharpie if he has to, but he will never back down.
If he really has to, he'll let an underling do that, then claim he was never aware of it and he's still right.
Boeing ? That supremacy has already demonstrably disappeared. Boeing is doomed.
Intel is not - yet. But foundries cost billions (aka real money) and take time to get returns from. Time that Gelsinger was not given.
I'm not sure that Gelsinger deserves this, whatever remarks he may have made about TSMC.
I am sure that it is beyond stupid to build a foundry in a state that has no water - but hey, who am I to complain ?
. . that knowing what is actually happening electricity-wise is still something that needs to be taught.
To think that we're going toward a future where electrical components will be designed by computers . . . if ever there is a glitch, there will be one hell a big puff of smoke.
The words "measure twice, cut once" come to mind.
Far be it from me to endorse anything Musk, but hell ; you're either non-profit, or you're profit.
What is this bullshit structure and how on Earth has it been endorsed ?
Have the balls to do things right. You want to make profits ? Say so and do so. Don't pretend to be non-profit while trying to skim funds behind everyone's back.
That's called cheating. Cheaters should get stiches, not profits.
You ignore the small customers, and the big ones find that your billing is outrageous, your quality insufficient, and they are ready to rewrite their own tools to move away from you.
Remind me again why the hell you bought VMware in the first place ?
Because if it was to kill it, you're doing a brilliant job.
Manglement gets a "bright" idea and goes about spending money without any analysis whatsoever.
The new kit cannot be installed without yet more kit, so another round of spending because hey, manglement is never wrong, right ?
Finally, new kit is installed at x times the cost, hits another hurdle and manglement gives up.
At least you got a nice server out of it.
I seem to recall reading, years ago, that we were approaching the scale of the atomic width, and would soon not be able to go any lower.
Yet, every year there is an announcement that the next generation will be even smaller.
How low can they go ?
Are we going to be told that we now have the tech to use quarks instead of atoms ?
Is this all just one big joke in the Matrix ? If it is, do I really want to take the red pill ?
There is nothing that makes pseudo-AI necessary.
Write it down in a book and publish that, if you must, but do not start artificial shrines to the memory of what was nothing but a CEO.
Are you going to start worshipping it every morning before the management meeting ?
What a crazy world we live in, and this AI bullshit is just making it worse.
I'm still waiting to see something that actually works.
In the absolute, it could, but at the condition that you have every birth recorded in a government-held database (that is inviolate), and that you are sure that the person requesting verification is the person who's record is in the database.
Good luck on that last part.
Sooner or later, the tide will come in. Corporations have no right to make decisions like that. Either they accept external software developers, or they don't. The only thing Google has the right - and the obligation - to do is ensure that apps on its Store are not malicious.
For the rest, Google has no right to choose. If it needs a cluebat to the face to understand, so be it.
Intel has long been a leader in the silicon industry. Hell, without Intel the computing landscape we have today simply wouldn't exist.
I have no empathy for a corporation. The US Government has, rightly, decided that it needs to guarantee the country's independance concerning critical technical products. The Board at Intel needs to toe the line, however much that might not be financially interesting for them right now.
If you don't try, you will never succeed.
It is better to fail than to do nothing.
If you fail, at least you tried.
It sure seems that employing a first-generation Chinese immigrant in a position that has access to key critical data is starting to look like a losing proposal from a security perspective.
Let them create restaurants and settle down, make children and live in the West.
Then employ the 2nd-generation, or the 3rd, who have not been endoctrinated by Beijing and are less susceptible to immediately send everything back to a home they no longer know.
Because I'm sorry, but the number of Chinese immigrants who have been caught stealing secrets is more than I care to count.
Apart from the censorship, there are a lot of things concerning the Internet that rather like in how China is trying to shape it.
Of course, there's the unfortunate fact that China is shaping it for political reasons only, but still, there are some good ideas there.
So-called "social media" sites will have to be reigned in one day. Things have already gotten out of hand with tracking and they're getting worse.
It might be good to analyze Beijing's decision under the eye of freedom of expression and freedom from tracking.
Amen to that.
I will drag my Win7 home PC and my Win10 work laptop for the next few years until my retirement.
At that point, I will have the time to erase everything Borkzilla from my personal universe and move to some version of Mint.
I'm sure it will be quite refreshing to have, once again, a Personal Computer.
I'll bet you are.
Welcome to healthcare. The industry that never has the money to do IT properly, but apparently has the money to redo its IT when required.
It's not enough to have guidelines and general procedures, it is high time that IT gets an instruction manual for large companies, and that healthcare gets the means and the obligation to do things right.
Unless there's a law, it will first have to be approved by The Board - and that's where everything costly disappears.
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