Posts by Pascal Monett

I'll not argue about Y2K, I was there

I spent over a year reviewing client databases to certify that they would be Y2K-compliant.

If you think that that work was worth nothing, you're welcome to your opinion.

"the answer is simply not to drive during a deep freeze"

I'm sure the people who only have a Tesla will be sympathetic to this advice.

As will their employers.

A valuable effort

I do hope they're going to keep that computer going for a long while. It is a worthy testament to the skills and engineering that built for us the world we live in today.

But let's not knock slim and trim. Let's not look down on those slabs of Gorilla glass and toxic metals. The slowest of them have more power than the Apollo flight that reached the Moon.

Slim and trim has brought us CPUs that do much, much more with much less energy usage. And are capable of auto-throttling their power consumption and thus their heat generation. That will be a very good thing for the space stations of the future.

"ripe for exploitation since May"

Wow. That's just 7+ months of serious vulnerability.

I'm glad I don't use GitLab. And it's interesting to note that not all 2FA methods are equal.

Security is hard, no denying that.

"their substantial egos"

With those kind, you have either of two possibilities : their ego drives the company forward (think Steve Jobs), or their ego crashes the company (you don't hear about those in the news).

"some workers, including Police, went on strike"

Um, yeah, when your police force joins the strike, you can't just mouth platitudes into the microphone and expect everything to calm down.

Of course, they employed the escalation solution : send in the army.

That always works well with a population that is already in revolt.

Geolocation data ? On a PC ?

It's not a phone. How can any geolocation data be stored ?

Yes, I can use Chrome and/or Google Maps, but whatever I choose to look at doesn't mean that I live there.

And if the malware checks the origin of my Internet connection, it will find that I live in Nancy, just like a hundred million other people, because that's where my provider's hub is (hint : Nancy has a population of around 30,000 people).

So what geolocation data does a PC normally have ?

A smartphone, I can understand. Please explain geolocation on a PC. I don't get how that works out.

"siphoning their high-powered computational resources"

Ah yes, that wonderful cloud environment where someone else can use your resources and you are not alerted to the fact until you get the bill.

It's marvellous to see that cloud can bill you, but can't guarantee who actually used the resources.

"As the law stands today"

The law is going to change since China has, apparently, banned the export of rare earths (wonder why nobody is talking about that).

So good luck finding new batteries for your precious EV.

"often bypassing traditional security defenses"

Well, it seems that traditional security defenses are going to have to consider GitHub a non-secure site and treat it as such.

Scan everything.

And stop bloody downloading things that you don't control to your production server.

"You're really creating a bit of a perfect storm"

Yep. That's about the size of it.

The quicker the corpse of Twitter is shut down, the better it will be for every sane person on this planet.

There is a solution

Stop jumping like lemmings whenever Borzilla hitches up the skirt.

Give it time, like five years. Then go check if the product is still there, if it has been finalized, if it is actually useful. Get off the treadmill you don't control.

It is high time Borkzilla leans that, if it is not making useful product, it won't get the greenbacks.

Really ?

"a fault-tolerant system capable of generating reliable results was likely a decade or more away"

I've got the feeling that we'll be hearing the same soundbite in a decade.

"for all the anxiety that it caused"

Oh ho, that was a good one.

Apologize for the anxiety caused by the leak, and don't mention the anxiety cause by being fucking laid off.

Well done. Corporate bullshit at its finest.

"a move that will decrease flexibility and opportunity"

Yes, it's a move that will decrease the flexibility and opportunity of companies looking to pay the bare minimum they can get away with.

And I note that there isn't any comment disagreeing with this move that is from a gig worker. They probably don't have time to comment, being too busy with simply trying to feed their family with the scraps they are so generously given.

"Hopefully this can be partially fixed"

Wow. What confidence in the system.

They're not clamoring for a fix, they're barely hoping a band-aid might be available.

And this is supposed to be the next best greatest thing for developers.

I'm not sure I'm impressed.

I avoid buying water in plastic bottles

Glass please. It's easy to wash, and can be recycled.

40Gbps

5,8Gbps might indeed be more reasonable, especially when you take into account that the current data transfer maxes out at several hundred Mbps (which is not shabby at all, not by a long shot - I can watch TV now, when I had an ADSL line, it was almost impossible).

WiFi delivering >5Gbps means over 700MBps. That will be as good as my gigabit Ethernet. So, since we're talking WiFi and not mobile data, that means my Orange box connecting me to them thar intartubes will be upholding that speed and that means that I will be able to use it.

Good news overall.

"I found a phone sitting on the side of the road that had apparently fallen 16,000 feet."

Apparently ? Not disputing the fact that you found it, but if it was undamaged, how can you say that t had fallen 16,000 feet ?

Indispensable ? Really ?

Looking forward to the many UI and OS modifications from intelligent people who cut this shit out of Windows to put the Personal back into PC.

The harder you push, the more resistance you encounter. I'm betting that this is going to raise shields like Borkzilla has never encountered.

For Apple, probably less. Jobsians are already brainwashed, they'll just think that this is the new reality field and will be fine with it.

She called it "a concern"

Yeah, having your passengers sucked out of the plane just like in every airplane catastrophe film is indeed a concern.

That is what Boeing is now, the groundwork for the scenarios of future flight accident films.

Thank God I don't need to take the plane anymore. TGV fills my travel needs nicely, thank you very much.

"the user-focused, data-centric ecosystem we so badly need"

The ecosystem we are living in has been defined by companies. Users that are not employees do not have much influence on it, they are not organized and don't have the time to care. Users that are employees follow the diktat of their management, which doesn't care one bit about user-centric. Management is management-centric, employees just need to learn the wierd, illogical steps to give them that shiny graphic at the end of the month.

"comes from renewable energy, we're told"

Well of course we're told that. You don't think that they're going to admit that it's that coal furnace nearby that is going to charge the carbon-emission-free focus of greenies everywhere, now do you ?

No, those dirty coal plants (of which more are being built, thanks Germany) only provide leccy to other things, their electrons are prohibited by public moral from entering the sanctity of an EV.

Yeah, sure. Pull the other one.

"AI makers believe training their models on copyrighted material is fair use"

Of course they do. The courts will teach them otherwise.