Posts by Pascal Monett

Eye strain and nausea

I already heard about that when Quake came out.

Doesn't happen to me, but that doesn't mean I'm a fan of VR. I'm not.

What bothers me with VR is having a headset when I have two gorgeous 26"+ screens sitting on my desktop.

What bothers me is that I am already perfectly immersed in today's games (7 Days to Die is unbelievable).

I don't need to shackle myself with a kilogram of poor performance to watch Nintendo-style graphics , thank you very much.

"seven-hour surgeries"

I would think that a surgury is a situation where you stay focused on a very limited amount of space. You're not driving a car, flying a plane or walking around town turning your head every which way.

So yeah, maybe for surguries this tech is good, and so much the better.

The funny thing is, humans tend to not like to have stuff stuck on their faces in order to just move around.

"Wayland's privacy controls mean that recording a video of what's happening onscreen is difficult."

Does that mean that tools like Teamviewer couldn't work ?

That's a death sentence in the business arena (not that that should be a problem for a Linux distro).

"Cloud was supposed to make life easier"

Yes. Supposed to. That's certainly how it has been sold (and is still being sold).

Unfortunately, the reality of the fact that you're depending on someone else's server tends to get in the way.

"a closed loop battery manufacturing process"

I like the idea.

Electric/hybrid vehicles are certainly nice, and it'll be a great thing for city dwellers when the noise of traffic is lowered to just the sound of tires on the road, but I've always been sceptical about the battery issue.

Not to mention that, if this is truly supposed to be a "green" solution, then we'll need to get rid of coal power plants - but okay, baby steps.

It will however be quite reassuring to know that batteries have become like aluminium cans - endlessly recyclable.

If we ever get there.

Am I glad that I'm not in this circus

"If a software vendor's private repository that contains their source code and intellectual property was leaked or deleted, this could literally mean the end of that company"

The code I write goes on a company server and stays there. The code itself can only be modified by very few people, and they have specific IDs. There is zero risk of some random nobody reaching the server, much less accessing the database and even less deleting it.

The Notes/Domino world has a lot of advantages.

Such is the world of venture capital

You don't have to have a product for people to shower you with money.

Then you can Magic Leap yourself into a life of wealth, even if you've got nothing to show for it.

NeuReality is going to be successfull - ML is already a thing so it can toy around with chip designs as long as the money keeps flowing in.

And when it stops coming, they'll just declare that the experiment was a brilliant success.

"photons can't be amplified, so their range is limited"

Well their range currently seems to be about 16 billion light-years. I'd say that's not too shabby.

They're also used in oceanic fiber lines, which span several thousand kilometers and are multiplexed to the max, so it's not the photons that are the problem.

Entangled photons, well that's another subject. And a quantum network is going to have to work with switches and other networking gear I don't even know about, so that's very likely going to be an issue.

But a photon's range is until it hits an obstacle, however distant.

"HCL promises upgrades are now easy"

They've been easy for a long time, development-wise. Heck, all the @functions from R3 (and probably from R1) are still there.

Notes/Domino has a long-established history of backwards compatibility, as far as developers are concerned. If you go to OpenNTF, you'll find plenty of apps written before R9 that still work. Maysoft has the Notes Document Viewer since forever (well, their copyright states 2002), and it is an extremely handy tool that I use regularly on R9 and R10 platforms. I'm sure it'll work fine on R12.

From a developer's perspective, I don't see what the problem is.

Of course, admins might have a different perspective, but I don't see that updating from R9 to R10 made any great difficulties in the companies I work with.

This announcement is just to remind Domino users that R9 is end-of-support. Well, okay then, but it won't prevent people from running their servers, no more than Windows XP has stopped running (and running, and running).

That said, R12 seems quite interesting, but obviously jumping from R9 to R12 is going to be a bit of a hassle.

"Beijing believes crypto is a dangerously unruly innovation, and mining it is a waste of resources"

I completely agree.

But I wouldn't stop people from talking about it.

Then again, my name is not Xi Pooh.

"stimulate demand in markets like PC and smartphones where sales have waned"

Um, guys, you might have noticed that you gorged yourselves in 2020-2021 amid a global pandemic ?

Do you really think you're going to profit again when all those people who'd never bought a laptop now have one and are (mostly) physically going back to work ?

You can lower your prices, but the fact is that a whole bunch of people now have a laptop they use less and less. It will last them a looooong time (well, until the battery fails, at least), and during that time they won't be buying again, whatever your prices are.

You need to set your expectations back to 2019, before the panic. That's about the best you can expect now.

"engineers tidied up [..] their source code, and [..] reintroduced the exploitable bug"

So, they "tidied up", but did not test.

Or, at the very least, did not test against proven vulns.

Coding is not always easy, but this seems slightly sloppy.

So, advertising doesn't bring in enough money then ?

$256 billion isn't enough to offer a free service ?

I think that's called greed, pure and simple.

"emergency powers to liquidate its largest customer account"

I'm sorry, but if I had €100 million in the bank, and suddenly found out that the bank's other customers had voted to liquidate my account, I would be pissed to the extreme.

As noted, it's hilarious to watch all these "decentralize" zealots suddenly rush to centralize when their feet go cold.

I love fireworks.

"Atos and the UK government have settled out of court in a case involving an circa $1 billion (£854 million) supercomputer contract for the UK's Met Office. The case brought by Atos was over claims that the Met Office and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) had breached procurement law and unfairly dismissed the Atos bid, awarding the contract instead to Microsoft"

So, Atos pulled a Bezos but actually won, and is getting paid for it.

Good for Atos.

"Quite an expensive misconfiguration"

Indeed.

And I fail to see how a "financial giant" doesn't have personnel sufficiently trained to set up a server.

Ten years ago I set up a website for the company I was an associate in. It took me all of an hour to find the data to understand and properly lock down the .htaccess file to ensure that the entire file structure of our server would not be accessible.

I'm not an engineer, just a University-level graduate. It's not rocket science.

Whoa there

"patch promptly, run anti-virus software, log off when away from one's desk, and encrypt data before transmission"

We're talking about government. That means that there's an IT department that calls the shots on patching.

As for encrypting, that would be difficult if IT has not installed and configured the tools to do so. The user is not supposed to be able to do that on his own, now is he ?

And if you think I'm logging off to go take a piss, I have news for you : I'm pressing Windows-L to lock my session and not lose my work.

I appreciate the intent, but there's a lot here that doesn't really depend on just the user.

"the site has been seized by the FBI"

Okay, good thing, but what about all those IoShite things that are still compromised ?

They're just waiting for the next bunch of miscreants to start all over again.

"a hard-hitting investigative journalist"

I disagree. Assange is not and never has been a journalist of any kind, let alone an investigative one.

He is an asshole, but that's beside the point.

All he did was recieve information and publish it. The US Government didn't like that, but that's not necessarily a reason to slam a foreign national into a US jail.

After all, the US jealously guards all its nationals that did hideous things in other countries, so what goes around should come around.

So, they're going after NASes now

I have a Synoloy DS414j.

I've checked my IP address on Shodan.io and I am not visible.

My NAS unit is up to date.

Do I have to worry ?

There is confusion indeed

My wife has a Samsung Galaxy A3.

So do I.

Yet, because her model is a year before mine, she doesn't have the same connector.

I will readily admit that I am fed up with these shenanigans. I have been forced (business reasons) to use a mobile phone since 2006, and not a single one has come without a specific charger and cable.

If you want to plug a desktop PC, on the other hand, the same cable has been in use for the past twenty years.

Stop the insanity.

"firing those involved"

Great.

Sets exactly the measure of how much SpaceX management is actually engaged to listen to its employees.

A shame, since that company is practically the only thing left at this point that can supply the ISS.

SpaceX is now the Uber of space.

Yech.

Autopatch ? Sure. Just shoot me now.

Borkzilla doesn't have the record required for anyone to trust such a scheme. Rollback, schmollback. Borkzilla is going to fuck up, that's a certainty, and when (not if) that happens, you want your backups to be in order.

How much longer is it going to take ?

How long before people finally understand that there is no Nigerian prince, no free lunch and nobody begging to give you money ?

Wake up, people. Money is earned by hard work (unless you are a member of the 1%, in which case your money is earned just by you breathing).