Posts by Pascal Monett

Rock star

It's interesting how besuited, Gucci-wearing so-called high-level executives want to be associated with what is commonly known as a depraved, drug and alcohol-filled lifestyle.

It's almost as if they have to compensate for their utter borishness by sprinkling glitter around.

The game of whack-a-mole continues

"travel bans on the seven and freezing their assets"

I wonder if these Russkies have assets outside of Russia. They probably have multiple crypto wallets, but I haven't heard that The Man can freeze those.

And for travel bans, I'm sure that has them shaking in their sapogi.

"in readiness for when fault-tolerant systems become available"

Hmm. As far as software is concerned, if you're dealing with a system where all possible values are automatically and instantly computed, I'd think that your software would be fault-tolerant by default, else it would crash.

Quantum computing is a very, very curious beast.

Ice volcanos beyond Pluto ?

Okay, Space is wierd and very, very large, but if it's already wierd that a 1,100 km-wide ball of stuff has a ring system, it is absolutely mind-boggling that it might have cryovolcanoes.

Jupiter's moon Io has volcanoes, but that's because Jupiter's gravitational field is literally mushing up that little pizza ball. Quaoar does not have such a luxury, and I very much doubt the Sun can be counted on for melting its surface enough at that distance to encourage icy volcanic activity.

So, if this stuff is confirmed - and it still has to be, apparently - then astrophysicists are going to have a hell of a time explaining how a dead ball of ice deep in the freezer of space can be active enough to spout frozen geysers that manage to create a ring in such conditions.

This is going to be a mind-bender of major proportions.

"how European laws should not apply to open source companies"

Not going to happen. Closed source has to obey the laws of the countries where it sells, there is no reason to exempt open source from the same obligations simply because the sale price is zero.

Besides, it's not like it's a problem for the developers. You don't want your code to be GDPR-compliant ? Not a problem, your code won't be used in the EU. I don't think there are many non-EU developers who are bothered by that.

EU-centric developers, of course, will have to ensure that their code is GDPR-compliant, meaning that they'll have to amend whatever FOSS code they decide to use to ensure proper compliance. The burden is on them (apply to other countries/law structures as applicable).

But all code should be compliant with the laws of the country in which it operates.

"Facebook parent could then offer that data to other advertising clients"

You mean : Facebook parent will then offer that data to other advertising clients.

FTFY

16GB of RAM is the minimum

Sure, you can run on less, but if you want to run Windows comfortably, you need at least 16GB.

And RAM isn't that expensive any more, so there's really no excuse.

"Global spending [is] a quarter of the US defense budget"

Following the data available here, a quarter of the US defense budget for 2023 is $236 billion, not $190 billion.

Choosing to compare that to the US defense budget is curious. Yes, the US of A is certainly the country in the world that spends the most on its military (even though it is the least likely to be invaded), but that fact is irrelevant to the discussion.

If you're going by a quarter of the US defense budget, $236 billion is the GDP of Egypt in 2017 (#44 in the list). $190 billion would be Iraq's GDP for the same year (#52).

It's much less sexy to compare global spending to a country's GDP, but I feel it's much more relevant than comparing to the world's single richest country's military spending.

But hey, American aircraft carriers are sexy, I admit.

And they work a lot better than that Russian one, eh Putin ?

Investigating RDA ?

From this article, it seems to me that RDA is doing its job. Found unwiped sensitive data on auctioned machines that had also been sold to public buyers. It is largely too late to bring in an NDA and, if the goal is to sweep the whole affair under the rug, well a certain Mrs Streisand who certainly like to have a word with that school.

Procedure update

I'm guessing that the New Year came with an updated procedure concerning the printing and manipulation of the end-of-year share certificates.

I'm also guessing that reprinting was not an option for some asinine accounting reason. I can reprint my invoices as often as I like, they don't change number, they don't change total and printing does not impact my customers' accounts.

But hey, this is the 21st century, so . . .

"the paying of the fine doesn't mean the company is admitting or denying"

It doesn't have to.

It paid, therefor it is guilty.

Innocent people don't pay fines.

"The issue is currently isolated to a small number of smaller and mid-size firms"

So it's not a problem until "the issue" starts targetting Big Money, at which point the battlecruisers will be sent out to deal with it.

But, until then, the small fry can get stiffed.

The NTIE forgot something

". . Apple and Google stifled competition by forcing apps to be distributed through their stores despite secure, safe alternatives being possible, gave preference to their own apps over third-party alternatives and forced developers to deal with a 'slow and opaque' review process"

Not to mention targetting apps that were not only useful but also better than the "official" app (or provided a user-approved service concerning the OS), banning it and then providing an "official" app that did the same thing.

But no matter, the ball is rolling. The wall around the garden is weakening and nothing can stop that.

I wouldn't be surprised, however, if either one of the phone giants is caught poisoning the alternative "secure" stores with malware-infested apps in order to point and say "See ? They're not as secure as we are. Please give us back our monopoly - it's for the good of the suckers consumers".

"Occasionally they disappear from the widgets board"

Business as usual. Three-fingered salute solves almost everything.

Carry on, Borkzilla ! You don't need a testing department any more, you've got all your users to debug things for you.

Now we're talking

Finally a service based on Blockchain tech that is a) serious and b) not a scam.

Looking forward to hearing about how said service handles itself in a country of 1+ billion possible users.

That said, it appears to need a thousand servers to handle 240 million ops per second. I have no idea, but I'm guessing that a traditional database platform could handle that amount of activity with considerably less servers - or blockchain.

I wonder what the server environment of the New York Stock Exchange is like ? I'm willing to bet they've got more than 240 million ops per second going on, and, from what I gather, it's pretty well traced as well.

Why not shoot it down ?

The USA has a lot of empty space within its borders. Or mountains. Shoot it down when it gets over the Rockies, it'll hit a mountain peak nobody is on.

Obviously, if it lands in a city that would be bad, but surely it is possible to know how long it'll take to drop, what speed it's going at and estimate how heavy it is (they've already shot one down, so they have an idea), and calculate the right place to shred the balloon.

Then ban sales of helium to China. It's not like one more item on the list is going to spark WWIII.

So, now it's the super app

Musk is abandoning Hyperloop as a front for his "genius" ?

I'm sure a superapp will cost less, but you need developers and ideas for that - and Musk has neither. It's easy to say that Twitter needs to become everything to everyone, but that's not a game plan, that's just an objective.

Musk is probably berating this objective every day, telling it to "give 150%" and "not leave the building until you're done".

Good luck with that.

"a viable analysis tool, out-scaling the world’s largest super-computers"

And that was back in the naughties, when the CPU was the only thing doing calculations.

To think of what could be achieved in analysis with today's GPUs and their massively parallel threads . . .

The SETI screensaver would just be a blur of colors.

I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it.