Posts by Pascal Monett

Honestly, guys

With all the precedents that have been set, and continue to be, you still hire Chinese nationals in national-security-sensitive or highly-demanding engineering posts ?

Shouldn't there be a bit more background research before hiring when the individual comes from China ?

You really bring it on yourselves sometimes.

"30 per cent better than the industry standard"

Hey, I'm thrilled for Tencent, but : what's the industry standard ?

A "misconfigured" server

Nice.

I'll have to remember that the next time I need to explain why somebody fucked up.

"which she believes work just fine"

No, it obviously doesn't.

But, no problem, another few years and millions of voters and she'll change her tune.

"He would like nothing more"

It's nice to see that billions still can't buy you the entire judiciary system.

Yet.

"Twitter’s head of graph learning research"

So Twitter has a graph learning research division.

Is it for finding a way to do content moderation ? Because if not, I don't really see the point.

So, we're now at 2nm

What's the unit smaller than a nanometer ?

Are we going to start counting in atoms ?

Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I had already read that we are approaching the physical limits of the Universe. Just as you can't do colder than absolute zero, you can't go smaller than the size of an atom.

So, are we there yet ?

The Borg is feeding again

So this is the latest spending spree from Borkzilla.

Oh well, I'm confident that this will not change the "quality" of Windows in any way, but I'm welcome to be (positively) surprised.

"taxing e-commerce the same way that [..] physical goods traded internationally"

In truth, I have to admit that that does not seem unreasonable.

At the condition that the trade is made internationally. Currently, I make purchases on Amazon.fr. That, to me, means that whatever international taxation there is has already taken place. If that's not the case, they should clean that part up, but I fail to see why I should be contacted for international taxes when I'm buying stuff stored in France from a French web site.

Looks like another storm in a teacup from where I'm sitting.

Hold on

"Lenovo has struck an agreement with Hong Kong China comms conglomerate PCCW"

TFTFY

So, only in China, eh ?

I doubt that gamers everywhere are holding their breath, desperate to get their hands on this new kit.

We'll wait for the benchmarks, as usual, and Intel hasn't ever really given gamers any reason to be clamoring for its GPU products, so . . .

"we have been hard at work"

Translation : Cloud is difficult and, apparently, not just for consumers, but for providers as well.

On that note, talking about alternatives is a bit useless. If Adobe had serious alternatives, it would already be dead.

My wife once took an account on FaceBook

I told her not to, but she wanted to because that way, she said, she could post vacation pics for her close friends.

Fine, I thought, after the vacation, we'll shut it down.

Well, not exactly, obviously. It took two years, but she finally told me one day that she was shutting down the account because she had noticed she was wasting much too much time on it and the other posters (ie morons) were constantly making her angry.

She shut it down because she was tired of being angry.

Hallelujah.

Where were the procedures ?

I agree that James launched himself into his own troubles, but where were the documented procedures on how to do what ?

Of course, this was back in the day and this is exactly the kind of thing that made people understand how important written procedures are.

Interesting article marred by dreadful time formatting

"The fire was subdued around 1000 after the electrical network was cut off and a pump boat arrived"

Around 1000 what ? Seconds ? Minutes ? Or is it supposed to be 10:00 A.M. ?

Military timing is all good, but a : every now and then wouldn't hurt.

"Workers were also told they could not discuss sexual harassment and discriminatin lawsuits"

The company does not have the right to impose that.

If you don't want your employees to talk about lawsuits, you need to make it so that there are none.

And I don't mean by silencing the victims.

"they came back in full force"

The only thing they're doing is relying on user stupidity.

Granted, there's apparently an ocean full of that, but when users will finally understand that you don't open mails from someone you've never heard from, their attack vector will go dry.

I give it another 10,000 years.

"a specially crafted Word document"

Once again, an attack that is based on the user opening an attachment from someone they don't know.

I've been getting a few mails this week with the subject "Re: your order is blocked", containing an attachment.

I haven't ordered anything. If you really think I'm stupid enough to open an attachment from an email I did not request concerning something I did not order, I just wish I had Thor's lightning at my disposal, because I would use it.

Liberally.

"Developers [..] with $11,000 to spend"

I'd wager that, if they had $11K to spend, they'd buy a new car.

If you want to improve your skills in IT, Internet is there for you.