Posts by Pascal Monett 16741 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
How exactly would China be able to say "We got here first, nobody else" ?
It's the Moon. If another base sets up a hundred clicks away, on the Moon that's pretty much an entire continent away. There's not much they could do about it except send a sterly worded letter from Beijing to the US embassy.
We're a looong way from being able to get tanks up there.
Bollocks.
SAP is not a social media platform. SAP provides (allegedly) the means for a company to manage its resources. There is nothing there that needs to be in the cloud.
The CloudTM is just SAP's excuse for wringing yet more money out of its customers' coffers.
Especially since there is no such thing as a completed SAP migration . . .
"We believe Figma and Adobe can deliver far more value for designers, creators and knowledge workers together than either company could deliver on its own"
Why do you have to merge to work together ?
Can't you just agree on a common product line, and have your engineers and developers work in shared teams ?
Because merging will bring nothing to designers, creators and knowledge workers. It will, however, consolidate shareholder value (extremely important), merge marketing departments and customer liists (there will be layoffs), and synergize development departments (there will be layoffs). Accounting will be in a tizzy for a year or two as well (and there will be layoffs).
But I see nothing in it for designers, creators and knowledge workers.
Maybe that's just me.
No, seriously. How can someone possibly imagine that taking video from professional customers, what with all the confidential details that inevitably are part of the conversation, and feeding that to a pseudo_AI is a good idea ?
Zoom decided it wanted an AI (what on Earth for ?), and its managers looked and said, well we have this data (why do you have it ?), let's feed that to the monster.
Zero thought, beyond here's a solution.
That's not a brain fart, that's negligence, pure and simple.
Not bad. Shows promise for the future.
I'm sure Chinese chip boffins are going to ramp things up. Good for the Chinese. Not so good for Intel.
On the other hand, commercial relations with China right now are not so good, and their future is completely in the dark. Things could get better, and they could get a lot worse. And given that India is apparently the country of choice for future sweatshops, uh, I mean industry, selling stuff to China is going to be problematic at best.
So, go Intel ! Try to not get your designs stolen.
I guess Tesla is right. If the owner has to go through the shenanigans of hacking his own computer every time he wants to start the car, it's quickly going to get old.
The article isn't quite clear on whether other things can be unlocked as well.
Still, spending some time every time you need to leave just to ensure that you have whatever features you didn't pay for but still want is going to quickly run up against the hassle of the wires, the laptop and the time it takes to dally around instead of actually getting where you need to go.
And good on Tesla for hardening their computing platform. "They couldn't get in" is about as good a reward as you can expect in this domain.
Now, if only they could get the autopilot working . . .
Especially in a company that installs a web server on every PC and has no use for it.
That was a brilliant idea there, or a wonderful absence of checking that the image had only what was actually needed.
In either case, if I had been in charge, someone would have been raked over the coals for that (not Bruce, I hasten to add).
Who hasn't ?
Just a few weeks ago, I was at a customer site during a migration to Exchange. I was asked to add an Internet Address to all the groups in the Name & Address book. The format was supposed to be <nameofgroup@companyname.com.
I'm not an admin, so although I found the request curious, it is not for me to speak up on such a matter. I created the required script, ran it, and all appeared to be well.
For about five minutes.
Then calls started coming in to the Helpdesk. People were receiving weird mails that they shouldn't have and didn't before. It just so happens that some groups had a group name that was very similar to some redirections defined on the internet side of the portal, and anything coming in from outside was now sent directly to all the names in those groups.
Oops.
Needless to say, I was asked to revert the change post haste, which I did in record time.
I then left them to devise some new format which wouldn't create a new dogpile of issues. Maybe by checking incoming redirection lists first ?
Unfortunately not.
A few years ago, as a partner in a small services business, we landed a contract with an organization that was building itself up on providing training for, shall we say, people in need (who didn't have the money, by far, to go and pay for a €650/day training course in the swanky spots in Luxembourg).
We set up the server, gathered the client PCs, set up the network, etc. Somebody else was tasked with making the classrooms functional.
At one point, I overheard the responsible person complaining that the cost of Office was prohibitive (yes, even the Education license, which is something they should have had no difficulty obtaining - that's the financial level of this whole thing). They had to use it on the student PCs, but they apparently wanted to avoid that on the "personnel" equipment.
So I said no problem, I can install LibreOffice for you. When I told them that it's officially free, their eyes lit up and I was the savior of the day.
A week later, I learned that they were still using Office - unregistered - because LibreOffice was "too complicated".
As I left the company shortly after and rescinded my partnership, I don't know how it all ended, so I'll just leave you to conclude on your own.
I'm not expecting that EE doesn't have any lawyers that would have actually read the contract.
I'm fully expecting to hear that EE manglement said "screw that, give it a try anyway", adding in petto "or else you're fired".
Anyways, it's nice to see that contracts are contracts, even when Big Money is concerned.
EE built a case around lost money for future subscriptions, and the judge actually read the contract.
Ah well, you win some, you lose some. This time EE lost.
"found that workers did less and made more mistakes in the afternoon – particularly on Fridays"
Ah HAA ! Yes ! I see it : false advertising !
The title leads the reader to conclude that it is on Friday afternoons that more mistakes are made. That is not the conclusion of the boffins.
Clickbait ! Clickbait !
It might well be able to do that. What it will deduce is that you should be encouraged to go to the pharmacy aisle to discover hair treatment products, hair regrowth products and assorted coloured dried frog pills.
No pseudo-AI we have now has ever deduced anything factually interesting about human behavior.
The day I stop seeing online ads for stuff I have just bought is the day I'll begin to grudgingly start accepting that "AI" might just be becoming useful, maybe.
Because if AI was actual AI, it would record the fact that I bought a UPS two years ago, and would start showing ads for replacement batteries in three years from now. Frightening as that may be, it would be useful.
But no, today's AI knows that I bought a LED flashlight, so it proposes batteries because duh, but it also proposes more flashlights.
Useless.
I see. The bill allegedly favors goverment and private industry use, so it will pass.
Sounds like India really is growing up. Now they're giving titles to laws to do the reverse of what the title suggests.
So India is following in the USA's footsteps. A sure mark of success, then ?
Reminds me of Skype, back in the day. Before it was adopted massively by companies everywhere, you were on your own when you installed Skype. So it was normal to be able to be contacted by anyone, since when you start out, there's not really any way to get to to know anyone.
But when companies finally got a "professional" version, existing employees were automatically (from the employees point of view at least) added to the contact list, so there was no reason to allow just anyone to contact you any more. Not for the majority of employees anyway (Marketing is always an exception).
With Teams, I expect the situation to be the same. You work in a company that has Teams for Suckers Business, you have all your company colleagues available, why should you accept comms from outside ? I suspect the only reason is for people to keep in touch with their personal acquaitances, which opens the nice big barn door allowing this kind of shenanigans to happen.
Besides, if you work in a company and you don't call IT for your problems, you are the problem.
Either that, or company IT completely sucks, in which case you urgently need to start looking elsewhere because, if company IT sucks, the company will not survive for long.
I am lucky in that I do not have Teams (or any similar product) nor do I need it. If, however, I was saddled with a customer who had that installed by default on the computer I was to use for work, I would find the way to restrict comms to internal contacts only, then I would try to keep it out of my way.
There will be no answering somebody I don't know, and especially not for IT or security issues.
He set up fraudulent transfers, attempted to launder the money and bought gold. Which he buried, like a true pirate.
He never would have been able to do any of that with a regular bank. Why ? Because banks are all signed up to the financial charter which is a stickler for security of funds. Under the charter, banks are forced to have internal tools of surveillance. Fund transfers don't ever just come out of the blue.
If those funny money platforms were signed up to banking charter - which they should be - then this would not have been possible.
So, if everyone agrees to keep this stupid crime-facilitating scheme (which I most definitely do not), then at least let's get them signed up to true responsibility.
This guy wasn't sticking it to The Man, he was in it for the gold. That should be harder to do.
Okay, India is a growing country, gradually climbing up to the status of first-world nation. It's a big country, with a massive market. Things will sort themselves out, with time.
Internet outages are imposed ? Well, there's a certain little constellation that should be able to alleviate that problem, so a proper comms setup should guarantee connectivity if that is necessary. Costs more, but if we're talking about attracting Big Business, there's money for that.
The state of roads, however, is a big point. It's all well and nice to set up shop in India, but if your shiny new production center can't run full speed because the ressources aren't getting there fast enough, and if it also has trouble shipping the goods, then Big Business is not going to like going through the hassle and might just prefer paying for the license and leaving the problems to local distributors.
But this move is a bit curious on one point : Big Business is already looking to India as a production platform, because dealing with China is apparently no longer "in", so why the license ? It doesn't make sense to threaten the person who is already visiting your house as a prospective buyer.
Staff used WhatsApp. That means that that was the easiest solution.
Which, in turn, means that there was no official solution. Or that the official solution was a pain in the ass to use and not half as practical.
People want to get the job done. If there is no official channel, they will find an unofficial one. The fact that they could install whatever they wanted on their work phones is another strike out.
Oh wait, did they even have work phones ?
It seems that everything concerning health in the UK is a bodge on top of an unfinished, poorly-thought-through and badly implemented job.
Stop throwing good money after bad. I rarely say this, but maybe it is time to nuke whatever exists, pour concrete over the remains and start fresh. But with a proper project this time.
That triggered me as well. How well do mail drones do in gusting winds on an island ?
Or, to be more specific, just how much energy is the drone going to need to get back to shore from a mile out, several times a day, and can it handle that ?
There's got to be a maximum wind speed for those things, and before implementing this project I think it would be highly useful to have the daily average of windspeed and check against max windspeed.
I mean, before buying a fleet of those things, preferably.
I seriously doubt that because apparently parents everywhere are quite happy foisting screens into the hands of their sprogs in order to keep them quiet.
Limiting children's screen time would apparently mean taking up parents' time occupying said children and we can't have that, now can we ?
Of course, there would be the option of raising children to be capable of occupying themselves, but that's silly talk these days.
Well, not to be gratuitiously contradictory, but in general I do expect that, if an effort is made to use ungodly amounts of electricity and cooling in order to produce something, that something had better be worth it.
Of course, I'm willing to give it the time to train and get up to speed, but if, after all is said and done, the end product is barely good enough for elevator music, then shut the damn thing down now and stop wasting precious ressources and time for nothing.
If I want to hear bad music, I can already turn on the radio. Nobody needs a pseudo-AI to add to that mess.
Maybe because Musk is promising auto pilot and not delivering ?
And several people have died because of that ?
Maybe because doors falling off cars is not exactly a death sentence ?
I'm sorry your God is taking a beating here, but he asked for it.
We need a "Poor Widdle Snowflake" icon.
"some police forces do see this national system as a viable alternative to procuring their own retrospective facial recognition systems"
Well of course they do. The fact that facial recog has been demonstrated as not efficient enough for actual security does not bother them. What they want is a system that can tell them when to hurl themselves onto someone, cuff him and drag him away for questioning. The fact that there is a non-negligeable chance that said questioning could reveal that the system was wrong and they are guilty of abusing their powers is not a problem - it's all a days' work.
Oh, and it's also interesting to note that none of them are for a minute thinking that not having a facial recog system is an option. No. They're all going to have one, so yes, it figures that a national system is much better.
The Police State is something we are all just easing into without a second thought.
How wonderful ?
I'm happy for them.
The difference is, when I hope for something, it only concerns me.
When a government hopes for something, it has the means to make it happen.
If UK Gov restricts itself to "hoping", then it hasn't done its job.
Lay down the rules if you want it to happen. You're Government, you're supposed to decide. That's what you're elected for.
If you can't do that, then resign.
Interesting point.
One would think, what with all the billions that viruses have been claimed to cost up to this point, that pricing security would be a done deal, those actuaries would have a full-time job and the cost of failure would be a regular part of marketing blurbs to close the sale.
It would appear, then, that all the hype around how muck the latest breach has cost the industry is not reliable enough for even marketing to pick it up and act on it.
Telling, isn't it ?
Of course they don't understand the nature of what is currently called AI. They don't understand Exchange either, but everyone has it so it must be had. Cloud ? Ditto.
The difference is that, with Cloud, they're starting to recognize the cold, hard reality of the bills and that it's hardly the promised land Marketing swore it was.
AI will be the same thing, except here there will be financial disasters that will occur and the bills will be as, if not more, important as Cloud.
At that point, after having costs a small fortune, AI will exit stage left and sanity will return.
It's just the beancounters that will be crying tears of blood in the meantime.
Significantly ? Really ?
How ?
How is the ability to query an unvetted stream of text going to increase any employee's productivity ?
Or will employees stop doing actual work and all transform into ChatGPT experts ?
I don't see generative AI improving beancounting, they still have to enter the figures into the right slots. It might improve quarterly reports, but it's the managers that do those, not the employees.
I don't see generative AI improving HR filing and reporting. Those sick days are not subject to dissertation, and job applicants' CVs are not read by AI.
And let's not even get started on building and farming.
No, the one sector where ChatGPT might improve employee performance is the sad remains of what was called journalism. I'm sure tweet-based "journalists" will find great advantage in basing their blurbs on AI, and maybe their readers will too.
Apart from that, I'd really like to know what Borkzilla is promising with Clippy 2.0.
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