Posts by Pascal Monett 16753 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
You just go on like that, Microsoft, and you might find one day that developers have decided that it is no longer viable for them to continue developing on your platform.
So please do keep on looking at the short term. What could possibly go wrong ?
Yeah, after playing about a billion more games than any human ever could.
So yeah, Sedol was beaten, but I can't shake the idea that AlphaGo kinda cheated. I'm pretty sure that, had Sedol played against AlphaGo after the same number of games that he had played, the pseudo-AI would have been soundly beaten.
Information ? Alerting users to a possible issue and encouraging them to patch ?
Do you really want patches to go unannounced ?
Users have enough trouble as is keeping their shit together; if you don't blare the horn about it they'll just go on sleeping and nothing will ever get patched.
Great idea. Something bad happens, go shoot someone. I approve.
Now, who exactly are you going to shoot, and how are you going to get in range to do so ?
Because, if I'm not mistaken, NATO rolling over Russian borders (or Chinese, or whatever) with tanks and troops is not exactly going to improve the situation.
That disk failure thing happened during my night shift as well. My co-shift wanted to move the disk to the third (out of four) disk unit we had. I strongly advised him against it, but he was very reluctant to call the systems engineer in the wee hours of the morning, so he did it anyway.
The unit failed, obviously, and now we had lost half our disk units. So the call was made, and I left that shift looking at the syseng trying to rebuild a system disk from scratch.
I didn't get any thanks out of that, but my co-shift had the balls to admit that I had advised against moving the disk, so there's that.
From the looks of it, it seems like they are the kind of taxes you can't really avoid, like interstate taxon shipments or somesuch. Yeah, I note that Amazon paid $1Bn in federal income tax. Does anyone really think that Amazon's revenue does not warrant more than a measly billion in income tax ?
As usual, it's just PR to make Amazon look good.
Yeah. That's a pretty lousy excuse for not wanting to invest in some more processing power.
I know that, to scale your web functionality to the maximum of your customer base is a ridiculous notion, but you might want to make sure that you have baseline plus a comfortable margin at all times, and emergency supplemental capacity when the demand balloons.
I'm sure there are plenty of companies that are willing to help, it's just a question of writing a check . . Oh, right.
Let's not exaggerate. A web browser install file is a hundred and some megabytes, an OS install is a DVD or three. Not to mention that the web browser does not manage access to the network, nor does it have to bother about how to write to the screen, or printing, or accessing the disk, or storing things in RAM. Those jobs are handled by the OS.
It seems to me that that indicates that an OS is a hugely complex system, much more so than a web browser.
I agree. For such terminal-only uses I would think that Linux would be the ideal platform.
The only reason I see is that there still isn't enough developers that work on Linux, in other words, it's much easier to find a halfwit that can bungle some code on Windows (not to mention managers that have heard of Linux are still rarer than hen's teeth), so companies use Windows on stuff where Windows most definitely should not be.
That Word macros don't run is pretty logical, it's LibreOffice.
That the page formatting is not good is because Microsoft is not respecting the Open Office format (even when it says it does).
And if you're opening a Word document saved as docx, well, it was saved in Microsoft format, not LibreOffice, so it's obvious that it's not going to play well with the competition. Microsoft does not play with the competition, it kills it when it can.
Now I know that people cannot choose what format they receive documents in, but there's no avoiding such issues when you have different programs to open the same documents.
On my professional laptop, I have Office 2013 and LibreOffice. I use LO by preference, but when I receive Office documents I open them in Office.
On my personal PC, it's obviously LO all the way.
I had a problem at a customer site with one Excel spreadsheet that would crash Excel at every load.
Customer was unhappy because the problem was in his backup as well (let's not talk about that, the day would not be enough to explain).
No solution other than to recreate the spreadsheet from scratch. Thankfully, since he used it so much, he knew what was in it, so it didn't take all that long.
Still don't know what he did to corrupt the file.
I admit that, by the time I got to the last paragraph I was in a bit of a rage on this telemetry thing and I kinda zapped it. So now I know that they have the telemetry on the images. That's rather smart, because there is no email client that can keep telemetry from happening if the images are not blocked.
And yes, I use Thunderbird, as well as all my family, so I am well aware of the image blocking by default. What I did not know is that it also stops the telemetry. I always thought it was just to preserve bandwidth. Now I know better, and I'm even happier about Thunderbird.
0.5% of what ? A billion emails ? Ten thousand emails ? Of the average amount of emails opened every day ?
And how does Mozilla know if I'm opening an email without the telemetry to tell it ?
That sub annoys me on more than one level.
Yeah, and I can perfectly well win the Lottery. I think the chances are about the same.
Sorry, nice article, but with Trump and his gang in charge expecting a reasonable policy is like asking a toddler to climb the Everest. Nothing reasonable has come out of the White House since the orange buffoon entered it, and nothing reasonable will come out of it until he leaves.
Meanwhile, yeah, it's chaos and infinite misery.
Sure they will, they'll have the components made in Taiwan in a jiffy !
Seriously though, this is a golden snouts-in-the-trough call for a company to create the required installations in the US, jack up the price tenfold and get the lucrative government contract because Made in America.
Oh, in order to maximize the margins they will, of course, hire cheap Chinese labor, but the management will be lily white all the way, so it'll be all good.
Google says that Meena is "built to have convincing chinwags with its human handlers", but it also says that "humans interacting with these systems have to do so in a rigid manner".
Well that is all sens of reality gone out the window. If I'm chatting with a friend, the interaction will have no rigidity at all. The manner will be relaxed, jpyful and possibly all over the place, but rigid it will not be.
“On Earth, we can predict if it is going to rain pretty much anywhere in the world very accurately"
Really ? Please give me a web site where I can get that level of accuracy. Unless your accuracy is : on Earth, because my weather reports have trouble telling me which day it's going to rain. I can't count the number of times I check the weather site the day before, and am told rain, and then I check the weather the next morning and I'm told overcast.
I'm sorry, but if your forecast is only good for two hours, you haven't forecast anything.
America warned everyone, and told nobody why exactly it could say that. In return, anyone with a brain did his own evaluation and found that America is frothing at the mouth and can no longer be trusted.
How much longer are we going to have to endure this fax-simile of diplomacy ? America is not warning anyone, it is simply trying to keep the market to itself.
And failing dismally, as it should.
What is this ostrich reflex that companies seem to adopt more and more ? If your product has an issue, shutting down your website doesn't really make things look better.
Yes, I understand, having to admit that everything is borked is not fun. You're a company. Have some balls. Own up to the problem. People really do prefer a company that admits its faults and works hard to resolve them, rather than a company acting like a kid who disappears when the pitcher of milk lays shattered on the kitchen floor.
That Ubiquiti made that decision in the current climate tells volumes about how much they care about their users' opinions (they don't).
I think that that decision will come back to bite them, because awareness is growing on this issue. Companies that just Trump around with their own promises are going to find that the market will react more and more.
And that is a Good Thing (TM).
That's called the Kessler Syndrome, depicted by the 2013 movie Gravity, which I really enjoyed.
Who knows ? Maybe tonight is when it will actually happen ?
If Microsoft made Windows 7 open source it would end its OS revenue stream then and there. The amount of developers that would flock to get DirectX code and port that to Linux, tweak the sources to get rid of the bloat and streamline the whole thing would be simply dizzying.
Microsoft simply cannot open source its OS. It has way too many technologies in there that it still uses and needs, and open-sourcing the OS without those technologies would be handing out an empty husk.
In spite of all the angst around the Windows UI, it's what's inside that really counts. And Microsoft is counting on that too, so proprietary it will stay.
A distant reality ? For the moment, it is totally science-fiction and honestly, I have to wonder if we will ever be smart enough to create industrially something that is actually intelligent. We are still learning how the brain works. We took twelve years to map the pitifully small 25 thousand neurons of a fly's brain, and it cost $40 million to get that result.
We are very far from understanding the most complex organ in our bodies and, as long as we don't, I fail to see how we will be able to create anything that is intelligent based on our technology. Frankenstein was a nice story, but there is no lightning bolt that will give life to a semiconductor. Artificial Intelligence, the real stuff, is not even on the drawing board for now.
Choosing a non-US network component supplier is "rejecting the cause of freedom" ?
I have breaking news for you, my dear : The USA no longer represents Freedom. Not with the NSA pilfering communications all over the world without any right to do so, and certainly not with a government that does not hesitate to separate children from their parents under specious border rules.
Besides, for a country that is so free market-oriented, you are especially badly placed to complain when the market doesn't choose you.
Sorry, no. I'm not going back to the days of checking the forums and search engines to find out which new MS patch I had to block or uninstall in a hurry to keep my 7 desktop my own and not get effing ads for 1 0 that I had no intention of installing, free or not.
Windows 1 0 is the eternal changeling, and MS has locked things down so that you cannot actually refuse to update anymore. And there's the ads. I don't care what solution you think you have now, it will work until Redmond's eye falls on it and zaps it with another update.
I'm not climbing on that treadmill for a million dollars. 7 is my last MS OS and that is final.
Besides, MS is transitioning to Linux, so I'll just wait for games to work and the transition to the penguin side shall be complete.
Surprise ? For who ?
They provided a free service that required non-negligible installation costs, hardware maintenance and a fleet of support vehicles and personnel.
And they got no revenue out of it, except for dubious ad-related stuff.
The only surprise is that this firm didn't get created in the dot-com bubble along with all the other stupid ideas that placed revenue last on the list of requirements.
Brand new, SAP-compatible hardware and the issue is done with. SAP doesn't run on special SAP PCs, now does it ?
Really, everything about SAP screams lock-in and expensive. On top of that, you have administrative muppets to manage the thing. They signed a contract in 2011 and nobody bothered to wonder about the hardware's end-of-life and what solutions were possible ?
This was not an unforeseeable problem. Somebody should have been paying attention, but no, back in 2011 it was Bonus Time, Yee-HAW !
Now you have paid millions for an ERP solution, and you're going to pay millions more for the same thing (but, in The Cloud !) because you couldn't be arsed to actually manage things.
Oh well, that how the market survives, with idiots paying the same thing several times over. On public money. No biggie.
Why is it that every new tech is automatically used as another excuse for flinging my data about to points I do not control and want nothing to do with ?
How is it that a slightly better memory tech means my local phone will suddenly stop processing anything ?
Stop it. So you might have a better version of RAM, fine. It's still RAM, and it will not change a thing as far as data processing is concerned. It will most certainly not create a world where everything millions of users do on their phones will be sent to a central computer (can we say mainframe again ?) for processing and the result sent back.
I'm sure IBM would like that, but no, not gonna happen.
It requires sustained political will, which is something hardly any country has these days.
Space exploration will go forth with private companies, helmed by billionaires, because they are the only forces left that have the vision and the willpower to get things done.
I personally doubt that NASA alone, on public funding, will ever get it done. NASA will be part of the trip, no doubt, but it is losing its position as leader. The question is, which billionaire is going to take point ?
Do not confuse the fact that tens of thousands of developers have desperately tried to make something that works and is useful under Windows with any technical superiority. Linux is demonstrably superior to Windows and you only have to look at Azure and the fact that its networking is managed by Linux boxes to realize that.
Yes. Microsoft uses Linux to manage Azure. Let that sink in.
You know what "the days of paper tape and teletypes" had ? Reliability. That is what Linux has, and that is what Windows will never have. One day, businesses will wake up to that fact, when the new generation that has not been brought up on Windows comes of age and starts managing things.
How is it that the entire board of ICANN has not been arrested for blatant and repeated breach of trust ?
I really would like someone to explain to me how an organization with a government mandate can just act any way it wants and suffer no repercussion.
If I had the power, I would just line them up against the wall and have them all shot.
Innovation ? What innovation ? A charger is a hunk of components that have one job : dividing wall outlet power into what the device requires. The biggest innovation that chargers have ever had is the possibility of modifying the power output. That's it, and it's been done already and you, Apple, did not do it.
And besides, you can go and "innovate" the charger if you like, we're not preventing you from doing that. What we want is one kind of power plug and the ability to use the same charger on multiple devices. THAT is innovation - the kind that is useful for the user. You know ? Those nebulous entities that pay you money for your overpriced tat ? Money that you are happy to put forward on your balance sheet and show to shareholders ? Yeah, those things.
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