Posts by Pascal Monett

Isn't it ironic ?

I imagine this from the point of view of the marketing department. They are likely young men and women, full of enthusiasm in a company that has a lot of impact.

They brainstorm something for June 4th and set it in motion, and all of a sudden Beijing come crashing around them, bringing all their efforts to naught.

I'm betting they are all thinking "but why ?".

And now they're going to find out, one way or the other.

So Beijing is basically educating it's people on the exact thing it wants to suppress.

"wary of criminalising the payment of ransoms by victims"

Didn't the FBI go through all those kinds of arguments already when they they pushed for criminalizing kidnapping ransoms ?

I seem to recall that that had a pretty good effect.

Report commissioned by Google

. . is in favor of Google.

Wow, that's astonishing. Must be totally unbiased and truthful.

Honestly, I would like to be a fly on the wall in the kind of meeting where a multinational behemoth comes with a suitcase full money and states what report it wants and what results it wants.

I'd really like to see the face of those so-called "journalists" eyeing the money and saying "sure, we can do that".

Just to see hypocrisy in the flesh.

Once, just once, I would like to see a report commissioned by somebody that did not conclude in favor of that someone. As it is, these days, every time you hear of a report with favorable conclusions for something, all you need to do is ask "which entity commissioned that report ?" to know why.

The whole system is despicable.

Ah, the bliss of remotes

At least, the bliss of not having too many of them.

I have two sets. Set 1 is TV and DVD player. Set 2 is Orange Box and VHS.

My CD player and amplifier are too old for remotes. You get off your ass and go press those buttons or turn that knob. Works every time.

"misbehaving cores"

Is the solution of replacing the CPU with another identical not a good idea, or will the new one start misbehaving in the same way ?

The article states that Google and FaceBook report a few cores in a thousand. That means that most CPUs are functioning just fine, so rip out the mercurial CPUs and replace them. That should give a chance of solving the immediate issue.

Of course, then you take the misbehaving CPU and give it a good spanking, euh, put it in a test rig to find out just how it fails.

A cyber-attack and no data had been leaked

That sounds a lot like they got hit by encryption malware, locked it down and are in the process of restoring their servers and possibly some of their PCs as well.

Good on them for not paying. Too bad somebody clicked the wrong link.

Earth's far distant future

If I'm not mistaken, Earth's far distant future is to have its atmosphere stripped away by the Sun in its Red Giant phase, with all the oceans boiled away.

The only question is weather the expansion of our star's diameter will mean that Earth will orbit from farther away or not, which would mean that our charcoaled planet will not be engulfed by our star's outer atmosphere and melt away.

Earth's far distant future is not to become Venus. That may, however, be a rather close future, geologically speaking.

Go for it

Call it Thorium, call it Natrium, I don't care. Get it up and running and stop those coal-based generators ASAP.

It seems that the worst is to come for companies that rent office space

The tendancy is getting clearer every day : beancounter's preference for diminishing costs is going to prevail over manager's ego trip in being able to count heads.

Suits me.

The eternal problem with thermodynamics

I'm not by any stretch a physicist, but I've often read that if you think you understand thermodynamics, you're wrong.

Anything that can help those brave firefighters is a good thing in my book. I hope this will pan out and become reliable.

People who put their lives in harm's way to go save other people deserve every bit of help they can get.

I'm missing the point

So Prosus is active in fostering communities. Great. Never heard of them.

Why does this need to be an acquisition ? Can't they just open a channel and throw So some money for maintenance ?

I get that current SO owners are really happy to become millionnaires (btw, way to go guys to confirm that your selling out is going to make you rich), but I fail to see why Prosus needed to acquire SO in order to "reach 1000s more companies".

No company throws a billion dollars around without a firm grasp of how it wants to monetize that. The penny will drop one day, and we'll all go "so that's why".

Meanwhile, Chandrasekar, go on pretending that SO is going to stay independant. Yeah, sure. If you don't know it yet, you'll find out soon enough that your independence is subject to your new master's will, and he spent big money on you. He'll want something out of it.

"responsible states do not harbor ransomware criminals"

Yeah, good luck with that.

From next to nothing to lunar orbiter in 2 years

That's shorter than the Apollo program.

Good luck.

Seems that the market functions like the Internet

It routes around obstructions.

"each cofounder had been hired individually – and therefore TUPE didn’t apply"

Leave it to The Zuck to find a loophole in a legal employment protection scheme.

That being said, we're talking about a co-founder here. That's not exactly the bottom rung in the employment ladder, if I'm not mistaken.

Where you're at the top, you take your chances and look out for yourself. Running to the employment benefit larder when you feel you didn't get your fair share is rather pathetic.

Happy that it worked out for him

Honestly though, it's a coin toss as to whether you will get roasted or not.

In this case it was about money, so there may well have been someone up the chain blowing his lid and getting all vocal about it. The fact that the hierarchy chose to look at the positive side, aka network performance, is just a stroke of luck.

"Not one of these is a bad game so when you add them all together..."

Terribly sorry, but stringing together the good elements from other games does not always end up in a good game. Just sayin'.

As far as zombie games are concerned, I have to say that 7 Days to Die is my preferred sauce at the moment. They're in Alpha on Steam, but honestly they could go full 1.0 and start talking about patching, because 7DTD is the best Alpha I have ever played on Steam.

“investigating the suitability of information shared via study flashcards"

No. What they are investigating is who the hell thought it was a good idea to post military operational secrets online and why the frak did they not tell Google's robots to not index that.

And that all boils down to : guys, it was last millenium. In this millenium, you still have soldiers who wear their FitBits in combat zones. Nobody understands the security risk of the Internet, but everybody can contribute.

Is this supposed to be a surprise ?

I think it'll take another hundred years before the military nails down the proper procedures.

Either that, or 100,000 losses. It's a toss either way.

"in my opinion, he should have been fired for that thing alone"

Oh really, Mr Cummings ?

And you have no such skeletons in your closet ?

I'm not really up to speed on UK politics, but I do seem to remember that you've done a few things that I thought should have gotten you the same result.

Pot calling kettle black, as usual.

"it could reduce ad fraud"

I can reduce ad fraud in an instant. NoScript and uBlock Origin kills ad fraud.

Oh, it also kills most ads. Well, you know what they say about omlettes . . .