Posts by Pascal Monett

It seems that ABC is well aware of the Streisand effect

On one hand, I understand that he wants to keep this under the radar. He wants to get rid of the page and doesn't want anyone to know who he is and what page he wants to kill.

On the other hand, it is kind of obvious that, if you don't tell the judges who you are and what you want deleted, it will be kind of hard for the judges to decide whether or not the request is justified.

So ABC really is in a corner of his own painting.

I've tried it as well

On my mobile phone and my desktop.

On the phone, I absolutely love it. Chrome can go take a hike. Pages load almost instantly, and I no longer see the clutter around and in between what it is I actually came to read.

On the desktop, I curiously continue using Firefox, although I am telling everyone else to use Brave. My wife adopted it immediately, because of all the hassle ads are on the shopping sites she goes to. Isn't that ironic ? Ads on a shopping site. You'd think they'd be more interested in providing a clean experience to make a user happy and get more repeat visits, therefor selling more. Oh well.

The man is certainly financially competent

Where his own finances are concerned, that is. Everything I have read about him tells me he is also a major pain in the behind.

So Icahn is behind this merger. Well now things are taking shape : Icahn wants it because he thinks he will be able to benefit from it. The number of layoffs that this merger would generate is none of his concern. So he will push and maneuver, then bother everyone to hell, then rant and rave until he gets what he wants.

I almost feel sorry for the boards of HP and Xerox. Almost.

It really is interesting

I find it fascinating to see how some people can create a dedicated team around an idea, raise serious money, and yet fail to bring the awesome idea into existence. Oh sure, Magic Leap has a belt thingy and a goggle thingy, but it utterly failed to make it interesting, and certainly not as interesting as the hype machine it pushed on everyone.

Kind of like the Segway, with the exception that the Segway cannot be faulted for what it does, simply for what we were brought to think it would do. Hype can be a dangerous thing.

Now Magic Leap is gasping for breath, and if I were a VC, I would really be thinking very hard why give money to a company that ate through over $2bn and has a dud to show for it.

JP Morgan is going to get ownership of the patents. What on Earth are they going to do with that ? License to Nreal I guess, and rake in the other license fees that already exist. I wonder what is going to come out of those patents, since what exists now doesn't exactly rock the world.

"effectively dismissing the Information Commissioner's letter"

Good to see that some people are taking care to get all the information before making a decision.

Elizabeth Denham should resign. Her job is not to protect companies and, unlike Ajit Pai, she is not working in the US. She should be ashamed of having expressed her authority in a matter where she had not seen all of the available information.

For an Information Commissioner, she acted in a singularly uninformed manner.

Isn't it good to be at the top ?

Chairman here, advisor there, life is good isn't it ?

To think that I can only be a lowly programmer all day long. I clearly wasn't born with the right connections.

"an onerous tax regime"

Looks like Vodaphone didn't pay the bribes fund enough lobbying to get a favorable decision in India.

"That beast was, of course, hugely expensive and entirely unsustainable in its final form"

Yeah, but it was also fucking awesome and it could lift 140 metric tons into orbit.

Today's best lifter would apparently be the Falcon Heavy with up to 50 tons (taking into account only those rockets that have actually lifted something into orbit).

There are a number of rockets promising to approach the venerable Saturn V's record, but none of them exist anywhere except on paper yet, so we'll just have to wait and see.

I wish him luck, for the employees' sake

"Our people need to be clear about their career path at DXC"

Oh, the path was quite clear before : the exit was right there. It's going to be one hell of a job to regain employee trust and demonstrate that management has indeed changed, if that is the case. Still, at least the are words about employee retention, that's a first change.

If this Salvino guy does turn DXC around, in mentality and not just profits, then I might well consider myself impressed.

Because he's starting pretty far down, one must admit.

"our commitment to provide robust protection for every individual"

That dates way back to the apparition of GDPR, yeah. Oh, and the jury is still out on whether or not Office 365 is GDPR-compliant, might want to clear that up.

Oh well, at least Microsoft is paying lip service to the notion of privacy. We'll just have to wait for the inevitable cock-up to find out how much it is fooling around behind our backs.

In time, I'm sure Cloud will be great

Right now we're still learning the ropes. I am convinced that Cloud is complicated, and DevOps, go fast and break things, and all the new thingamabobs they keep adding to remain "competitive" are certainly not helping in the stability and availability sides of the operation.

In twenty or so years, when the long-toothed DevOps guys have actually gained the wisdom of experience, I'm sure Cloud progress will be at a much more sedated pace, and availability will be up there with the famous Five Nines.

But first, we're going to have to live through the breakneck (and neck-breaking) pace of those young whippersnappers who have to invent everything Right Damn Now and get it into production yesterday.

I'll keep my data on my own network during that time, thank you very much.

"no requirement of 'registration' for deactivated firearms"

Right, so people are automatically going to volunteer the information that they had a deactivated firearm. Sure. That will in no way bring attention to them, there will be absolutely no investigation launched into people who "notify" several weapon transfers, and nothing bad will ever come to the people involved.

Come on, you don't require registration of such weapons, why do you suddenly need notification of change of ownership ? That is equivalent to saying that someone else now has it, which is the same as a registration in that person's name.

Might as well impose ID cards.

Always bet on Javascript

Oh, but I always do. I always bet that there will be some JS somewhere that is just waiting to pounce on my machine and screw it up.

That is why I use NoScript.

Interesting problem

How is it possible for a computer to allocate a room that is already occupied ? It should indeed be a computer problem because I very much doubt that there is any booking system where the clerk can override room status on an occupied room - that way lies madness.

So there clearly is a bug in the system, but what on Earth could it be ? The database is corrupt ? The system got hacked and nobody's noticed yet ?

Anyone got any ideas ?

The task sounds enormous

So, two low-scoring vulns could be combined into one big problem. Sure, theoretically, but how do you evaluate just how many low-scoring things can be combined and in what way, before you can rate all of them properly ?

Security is always in hindsight. We know to look out for privilege escalation issues because some hacker one day taught us that it worked. We have a body of knowledge today that is certainly impressive, and it will be one hell of a task to knit all that knowledge together to create a proper rating system, but there is no such thing as automating the risk evaluation - it has to be analyzed by a human. Humans don't know everything, and are rather bad at taking into account hundreds of parameters at once.

It is obvious the CVSS is not very valuable, but crafting a good replacement is going to be a massive headache. And yet, it should definitely be done. Good luck with that, then.

"Intel [..] would not intentionally mislead,"

Funny you should say that, given how many times you've already been nailed to the post for misleading reporting on performance. So either you employ incompetent people to draw up your reports, or you don't do enough reviewing before publishing, or . . you're marketing efforts are a bit too zealous (yeah, let's put it that way).

This kind of behavior is quite common in the industry, just look at the continual skirmishing between NVidia and AMD on the graphics side of things. AMD is always being forced to defend the performance of its processors in all domains, because AMD is a worthy contender and we need AMD to keep everyone else in line.

IT is the one domain where the numbers should not lie. Thanks to AMD for their continual efforts to keep it that way.