Posts by Pascal Monett 16741 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
I doubt that there are many tire manufacturers that make tires for surfaces other than roads. There may be some models that are special for all-terrain models, but all tires made on Earth have one thing in common : an atmosphere around them.
Rubber tires in space would be a catastrophe. I saw a documentary on the lunar landing, where it was explained that the tires for the lunar rover were, in fact, a wire mesh that behaved basically like a normal tire.
I wonder why they didn't use that concept ? It's not like NASA didn't know about it, so what reason did they have to reinvent another wheel type ?
I don't think it matters all that much. It's funny how nobody is talking about the consequences of notebooks "flying out the doors", namely the fact that, when the confinement is lifted, workers will be going back to their cubicles, hand in their laptops and get back to regular work. All those laptops that have flown out will still be out there, companies are not going to throw them away. They'll keep them as replacements.
Which means that the laptop market is going to tank, and soon. If everyone who needs one has one, then no one will be needing one, so sales are likely going to pancake.
That's what I'm guessing anyway.
Only if BlueTooth is enabled, I'll wager.
I only enable BlueTooth when I'm in my car to get hands-free communications, so it won't work. And if you think I'm going to enable BlueTooth just because I'm leaving my house, think again.
I've been quarantined for three weeks already, this is going to be my 4th. I don't have the bug, and I'm not meeting anyone so I still don't have the bug.
I don't need the app and I won't install it.
At my first uni our PCs were still on DOS - this was way back in the late eighties. I think it was DOS 4.0, in any case it was a version where you could put the disk prompt in color and many other things.
The first time I got my hands on those PCs I obviously wanted to have a look around the C: disk, but I got an error each time I tried to cd to a directory. It took me ages to finally grep that, with the prompt embellishments, our professor had managed to rename "C:\" to " C:\".
Simple, yet devilishly effective.
Of course, when he had noticed that I had discovered the ruse, he gave me his trademark stern look and made me promise not to tell anyone - promise which I honored scrupulously.
Details ? My IP address, you mean ?
Because you don't think I'd sign up to something free and input anything actually meaningful about myself, now do you ?
China is welcome to my chats with my friends. I'm sure they'll be fascinated in listening to us plan and execute raids in 7 Days to Die. There's a lot of tension sometimes, there can be victory, but there can be death as well.
No, I'm not bothered about China listening in, or anyone else for that matter.
What I am very bothered with is high-placed people and/or companies that lie to my face. You said you had end-to-end encryption, but you lied. You said you had actual encryption, and you lied again. Don't come to me saying that you don't use the same definition of the word. You know very well how people use that word, and you used it on purpose. Now that the truth has come out you're trying a charm trick to pretend that you care.
Well I don't care about you, you are on my blacklist and I will never be using your product, even for gaming chats.
You should have been honest from the beginning. Nobody would have cared if you had said that your product used basic encryption. Nobody would have batted an eyelid if you had stated that comms were encrypted from client to server. It would have been honest, the public couldn't give a damn, and you wouldn't be in the spot you are now.
Serves you right.
Could someone please explain to me how Australia is subject to US trade restrictions ?
They are aware that they are an independent country, are they not ?
Because even if the Australian government is hinged on the White House's every word, it's still Australian law that counts, no ?
And I, just like tens of thousands of others, am right in the middle of this.
Thankfully, my best client has given me a special VPN account so that I can still help them from home. Of course, once the crisis is over, I will lose that account. That's something I will regret.
Another client has notified me just yesterday that they are willing to send me a laptop via DHL so that I can help them as well.
I guess I'm rather lucky. On the other hand, being a freelance means I can't furlough myself, so it's all relative.
I'm willing to bet that all of them
1) have no technical understanding of what they're using
2) are incapable of making a backup if their life depended on it, and
3) will still not learn the importance of backups if it does happen to them
That is the price to pay when computing has been commoditized. That thing that is grafted to your hand is a computer. Learn how it works beyond just flicking screens from right to left.
Yes. Great idea. For the hackers and scumware writers that is.
We've tried that already. It was called ActiveX, and it was a bloodbath.
Do you really think it's a great idea to offer local resources to someone else's server without any control whatsoever ? Hackers can already encrypt your data and hold it to ransom, what more do you want to give them ?
Apple is a specialist in observing what works around its ecosystem, adopting the key functionalities into one of its own apps, and then throwing out the "copiers" because they're doing the same thing.
The only difference is that, this time apparently, they tried that on a company that has the money to take it to court, instead of some lone developer they could shit on without retaliation.
I'll be interested in reading about this case.
Trump has been pushing China and trying to get people to think that he is punishing China.
The only real effect is that China is gearing up to be self-sufficient. It's going to happen, and when it does, the USA is going to learn just what it means to not have a practical, pliable industrial base for creating all the shit it consumes year after year.
Because if making stuff for the USA becomes an optional activity for Chinese companies, the US is going to actually have to learn to make stuff for itself again. With all the pricing effects that is going to have.
And I can't wait for that to happen. We need to learn to pay the just price for the things we want. That will encourage us to really think about what we want. And that will put a brake on plundering the riches of our planet while throwing them away at the same time.
Well, I hope so anyway.
Well, I'm just guessing - and I'm probably reaching a bit - but I think it might be because the US government isn't really bothered with ensuring that Native Americans are educated to the point of being able to get a degree. In anything.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong, though.
Yes, and he has since died. The Chinese government has also expressed its displeasure on how that was handled, is now treating that man as a hero of the nation, and has forced the police to offer their apologies to the grieving family, leading to disciplinary action against one or more police officers involved.
And how the heck do you install more memory without powering down the whole thing first ?
It's nonsense to think that the server would be installed with maximum physical memory, then configured not to use it all. If a server needs more memory, you need to physically get the DRAMs to the server and slot them in. How can you possibly add memory without doing that ?
And sure, I get that these are virtualized servers, but the physical box they run on still has to have the memory needed in order to increase the amount allocated to that cache server. I'm guessing we're not talking about 4GB here, but much more than that.
Yes, what of it ?
Where is the proof that there is anything to be controversial about ?
The only controversy about Huawei is why the US Government is harping on about it without ever bringing any concrete evidence to the table. And you can fuck right off about national security concerns. Huawei equipment is publicly available, anyone can snap a pic of a suspicious motherboard, yet no one has.
This bullshit has been going on for longer than I care to remember, and I'm sick of it.
So, on top of all the functionality that that little wristwatch-sized thingy already has, they've added a built-in GPS receiver. And they can log the data for a certain amount of time.
My, my. Technology really can do wonderful things.
I wonder how much energy a GPS receiver uses ?
Agreed. I read that and noted that nowhere, in the list of entities that concern Amazon, nowhere are "employees" mentioned.
It is blindingly obvious that unions are not in the best interest of shareholders or associates. The interest of customers is not so clearly defined and seems to have been added to the list purely for numbering points.
In any case, the only people who do indeed have interest in unions are the employees, because they have no other way to voice grievances with a chance of getting a positive result.
So we now know that there are indeed intermediate-mass black holes, which we did not know before. Since we didn't know that, we could not factor their mass in our calculations for the amount of normal matter that exists in the Universe, which means our ratio of dark matter to normal matter is wrong.
Of course, we still don't know how much mass is harbored inside those things, and evaluating that is not going to be easy.
Add to that the fact that brown dwarfs are also an unknown quantity and it seems to me that there is significantly more normal matter than we initially thought. Probably not enough to do away with dark matter, but likely more than the 15% it is apparently currently pegged at.
Their future is indeed dark. If I'm not mistaken, even in good times they're not rolling in dough and, right, now, they are cursed and avoided at all costs.
I hope the people who make their living in that market manage to pull through.
That said, concerts are not going to disappear any time soon, so they have a chance, I think, at survival.
I don't see how Human culture is restricted by copyright. You have the right to read the book. The author has the right to be paid for writing the book. Where is the problem ?
Oh, you mean that the plagiarists cannot use someone else's idea ? And what are they adding if they just use someone else's idea ?
Of course, saying that, I remember that Science-Fiction would be much poorer if our greatest authors had not liberally plundered each others ideas and built on them.
Hmm. It looks like this is more complicated than I thought.
But let's make one thing clear : life + 70 is only because of Disney, which is especially ironic when you think that Disney pushed that to defend it's hold on Mickey which we haven't seen in 50 years.
It is high time copyright gets revised to something more reasonable : lifetime + 5 years, for example.
And it has to be the lifetime of a human being, not a company.
Once again, Ms Stob demonstrates an iron grip on the true issues that beset us, to illuminate our minds with the understanding of the processes that grind finely to control our lives, while peppering the text with delicious jabs at chosen targets.
Donald d'Orange. I love that.
I've got the feeling that there's a good share of those who think "moving to the cloud" is going to solve all their problems.
If your only solution for IT is The Cloud (TM), you're in for a big disappointment.
Oh, and "76 per cent said by standardising and consolidating applications" ? Methinks there's some overlap there. As well as some bullshit bingo. What does "standardising and consolidating applications" mean, exactly ? Getting your accounting, HR and CRM from the same vendor ? That might not be such a good idea. Maybe your vendor's accounting package is a pile of crap compared to another one. And how do you standardize an accounting package with a production management package ?
All that boardroom lingo is just code for "we're going to throw money at new versions until the problems stop". Cue the anguish when they've solved all their old problems and find themselves with a bunch of new ones.
Citation please ?
It's kind of difficult for me to imagine that Huawei would have the advance it has in 5G if it had had to steal the tech from Cisco who is, apparently, nowhere near the same level. If Cisco had the upper hand on the 5G market and Huawei was biting its heels, then maybe you'd have an argument.
As it is, the whole reason for Trump's trade war and Bloomberg's ruinous fall from grace is because Cisco is not the top dog anymore, and Trump & Co will stop at nothing to try and drive Huawei away.
That from the champions of capitalism. Well, as long as it's in their favor, that is.
I would rant about how utterly useless such an app is, but then I realize that, if that's what it takes to keep people to respect social distancing and minimize the strain on our hospitals, well then carry on ! And make another one with manga face filters or something !
Just keep them occupied, for Pete's sake.
Well, for everyone's sake, really.
Well, maybe they'll have gotten to the mythical mass production momentum before my good old, non-smart, 50kg CRT continually functional Philips Pixel Plus finally goes to the great trash heap in the sky for a well-deserved rest.
I will honestly regret the day that happens, that TV is by far the best I've ever had.
And it doesn't need to fucking phone home to show me my film.
Everything I have read about this scooter tells me that it was a piece of trash, made for the least buck possible.
Yet, you cannot blame Xiaomi for responding to the market. Not the market of individuals, of course, the market of pie-in-the-sky, probably-never-had-a-scooter-themselves morons who scooped them up by the hundreds to foist them upon the unsuspecting in the hope of making money - some day.
Look, I know that being disruptive is not easy. Not everyone can just profit from someone else's vehicle and time in exchange for vague promises and some loose change. Sometimes you have to put something on the line yourself. It's the good old "to earn money, you have to spend money". Then you check how much you have to spend to ensure a reliable service, and your accountant has a heart attack. So you go with this pile of crap and hope for the best, instead of realizing that, no, your idea was nice, but not economically feasible.
Oh well, at least Xiaomi got some money out of it.
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