Posts by Pascal Monett

They call that smart ?

"Tommy Jeans [..] included chips in some of its products that allow the user to track how frequently they're wearing a particular garment"

That is what we are polluting the environment for now ? A chip that can tell you how many times you wore something, wow. Gobsmacking. How utterly useless.

You want to put intelligence in clothes ? Make chips that can tell if the shirt goes with the pants. Make chips that bleep when garish color combinations are being chosen. Make chips that tell you "Alert : clothes tissue is stretching beyond advisable limits - choose larger size".

That would be smart.

"It makes perfect sense for Microsoft"

Of course it does. Bring everything into Azure, tag on subscription plans and watch the Cloud revenue stream gradually replace the OS one as Windows slowly fades into oblivion (ok, veeryyy slowly).

Microsoft is not full of idiots - just the GUI department is.

"its surface only had two meager craters"

Yeah, well its size is minuscule and it is far, far out there. There's a good chance that most meteorites missed it and went on to hit the Moon - or Jupiter.

Nonetheless, great science !

Secretive companies

I don't get it. You're doing kernel development, not photo-enhancing software, raytracing optimization or advanced Wall Street financial algorithms. You want your kernel to run on all the hardware ? Then publish your test data and get the bugs fixed.

But that will fix your competitor's bugs ? Um, we're talking about Linux. It's free. You're contributing to the community and making all products better. There is no competition here, there's only the product that best suits the customer's needs.

This is definitely the area in which product is judged on merit, not on price. There is no prejudice in publishing all the details of the bugs so that the community can benefit and solve the problem.

This secrecy mindset is legacy from the time when everything was closed source. The world is changing, get with the program.

"make robots better protected against cyber-attacks"

How about not putting in a WiFi or BluTooth antenna ? That will already do wonders to protect them.

Because if you're expecting connected robots with a robust firewall and efficient intrusion detection, well let me just say that, post-Brexit, it would appear there won't be much competence available to write that kind of code.

Just a second

"Uncle Sam remains convinced that the vendor's close ties to the Chinese state serious advance in 5G technology make the manufacturer a massive espionage and surveillance competition threat"

And Uncle Sam is right, and Uncle Sam can also shut the fuck up. This is Capitalism At Work, and you, after having spent the past eighty years screaming the apology of Capitalism with a capital "C", have no right to be against it when you're not the one reaping the rewards.

"it still takes me 17 minutes to log on"

Um, sorry but that's not a Windows problem, it's a hardware problem.

Upgrade the RAM from 1GB to 8GB, upgrade the processor from a Pentium to an i7 4600 and put a 1TB SSD to boot on and you'll only need a minute to log on, if that. Of course, you might want to upgrade the processor first, because there's a good chance you'll need to change the motherboard as well.

2000 pascals, 20,000 pascals

All that is very nice, but how much noise do they make ?

Because suction power is important, but me being able to not leave the house when they work is as important to me.

"some of the labels used to describe them are biased and racist"

Now that is a real problem. You can argue that images posted on the Internet are public, but you absolutely cannot argue that the guy labeling images made a slip of the keyboard. If image labels are racist it's only because some asshole in charge of classification was a racist.

No wonder facial recog systems are acknowledged as being biased against non-white people. If any random AI training project has racists labeling pics then it would seem quite difficult to have any AI project that only has non-racist people handling the data.

To think we're in the 3rd millennium. Seems like we'll need a few more millennia before Humanity actually becomes intelligent.

Of course it's the final version

Until the next update, that is.

"a seamless and cost-effective experience"

Yeah, right up to the point when the connection goes down, a regional hub goes down, or everything goes down and the backups are lost.

Trusting your data to anyone is a risk. Trusting your data to Microsoft is a game of Russian roulette.

So HMRC basically wants everyone to be employed

I'm sure that's a great thing, right ? All the government contractors that are going to disappear are going to have to replaced by somebody, and that means hiring, right ?

Oh but, the government doesn't have money to hire anyone ?

Well then HMRC is basically putting a halt to every IT project there is in the UK. Well done !

"Salil Parekh, is still CEO and managing director"

For the moment, apparently.

Look, one whistleblower event can be a mistake, but two ? That has to mean that Infosys some serious issue to resolve one way or the other.

"We are going to make printing forest-positive"

So all the printing that has already been done is all good because of efforts that you promise to make in the future ?

That's like a teenager saying that you can give him his allowance this week because he'll start cleaning his room next month.

And what of all the cartridges in landfills ? Are you going to pledge to recycle that and make your entire line carbon-free with offsets ?

Somehow I doubt that.

Oh, and that "monitor the types of paper used" thing. Does that mean that we'll also have to buy HP paper or the printer will say no ? Now that's something that could happen - until the inevitable court case throws that toy out of the pram, that is.

Charities are not the only ones to get hit by fraudulent email attempts

There are a number of companies who have paid rather important sums on the basis of an "urgent" email alone. And those are companies who have a finance director who is supposed to be an actual professional, not a charity whose "finance director" is the guy who agreed to take the burden.

After reading the above posts, I have to agree that it is hard to be sure that you can trust a charity. There are indeed many charities that are nothing but scam operations in disguise. But there are many more charities who are doing the work they proclaim. And there are some charities who are extremely important, and need to have competent people at the helm. The International Red Cross is a charity that I think is trustworthy, and I hope the CEO at the helm of that one is getting some good coin because he's got loads to do to keep things running smoothly (if they ever do in that area).

So he's playing the sickness card now ?

What a coward.

"only expose MSSQL servers to the internet if necessary"

Well duh, Microsoft. People don't create SQL servers and plug them into the Internet just for the fun of it. For lots of people, it's the only way they can do business.

"unlikely to discover all the nuances and implications of the various data flows"

In other words, there is no way to be sure that GDPR can be respected.

That said, the only possible conclusion is that Window 1 0 and Office 365 should not be used if privacy is your concern.

Funnily enough, the report does not come to that conclusion.