Posts by Pascal Monett

"The company disbanded its media relations unit in 2020"

So now the company relies on court cases and government directives for its communication ?

Is Tesla that shitty ?

Sovereign clouds

I rather agree with that idea.

And basically I'll agree with anything that keeps the NSA away from my data.

Since I cannot prevent or forbid anyone from putting the data they gather on me in a cloud, well a sovereign cloud is the least bad option.

Of course, that presumes that the NSA doesn't have its claws in it in the backend somehow - and that might be quite a presumption.

Especially if the cloud uses Cisco hardware.

240Tbit/sec

Wow. That's a lot of cat videos, to be sure.

Given that this is going to be a brand new cable, I'm guessing it will use the latest tech, signal multiplexing etc etc. We've seen articles here on transfer speeds in the lab, so what tech is actually going to go into this new batch of special fibres ?

We need a kitty icon.

"the Agency is very keen on protecting civil liberties"

Just like the NSA, we know.

They both want to keep civil liberties closely protected.

Very closely.

Brilliant !

Government creates for-profit enterprise to supply government, then decides that it can bestow contract on it without public tender.

No way anything can possibly go wrong with that.

Next you'll be telling me that there are absolutely zero MPs or parliament officials involved on either side of this deal.

Is Dido Harding lurking anywhere near ?

Oh goody

I wonder how long that will take to fall over.

It really is a shame the boffins couldn't work in a brush on a stick.

Not blaming them at all, I'm sure they thought of the problem.

It's just a shame they couldn't get one in.

"The application supplier assured the southern-England council these changes could be accommodated"

Okay, point 1 : the application supplier lied. What a surprise.

Point 2 : the application supplier mismanaged the project. Everybody knows that you accept a project on a given list of points. Anything else is punted on to the v1.1 to-do list.

Well, if you know how to run a project, that is.

Wait, what ?

"Other areas cited where the US exceled within IT were OS kernels"

I'm sorry, am I supposed to believe that the Windows 1 0 kernel is a point of excellence ?

Apple's iOS might be slightly marginally better, but I would still not call it excellent.

Linus Torvalds is the only person I know of who could be called excellent at OS kernels. The fact that he lives in the US now is just a coincidence.

Now, China may be behind on tech today, but thanks to the rampant and very public xenophobia of the previous US resident in the Oval Office, it has recieved the impetus it needed to start getting up and standing on its own two feet.

China might be suffering now, but the tech landscape will change and the US (and Europe) is going to have to learn to fight tooth and nail with quality, not just bluster, diplomatic backhandedness and aircraft carriers.

The dragon is waking up, and that is going to shake the market like nobody can imagine today.

That's a nice list of bullet points

One I'd like to see Apple adopt.

So nice to see that the worst enemy of the richest company in the world is the next-richest company in the world (they're in that ballpark anyways).

Ah, to think that there was a day when Apple was only 5% of the market . . .

"Management listened"

Well duh, when the investors speak, manglement had better listen.

his firm will "continue to support" Arm as a "proud licensee for decades to come."

And that's all it needed to do.

I am glad of this decision.

I'm missing something

Ever since Office 2010 I have had a message when I open Office documents not from my organization. It says that the file is open in Read-Only mode and I have to click some button to make it editable and run macros.

Is this some special hack done by the network admin ? Policy or something ?

Because, as far as I can see, the protection is already in place. Does this message have nothing to do with macros then ? I don't see how that would be logical.

Then again, this is Borkzilla after all. Logic is not it's strong point.

"servers have a useful life of five years"

That is interesting. I know nothing about server loads in the Cloud, but I'm guessing that they're more hammered than many on-premise company servers. Does that have a real impact on hardware life ?

I mean, sure, the disks will need replacing every now and then, but that depends on the disk, not on an arbitrarily-determined lifespan record. I've just bought a few 8TB NAS discs for my Synology. They are guaranteed for the EU-standard 2 years. They will likely have a much longer useful life, but they're spinning rust. I will use them until they fail, not until the warranty runs out.

So five years for a server, why ? CPU and architecture progress has slowed to a crawl, and I seriously doubt the newest USB protocol is a requirement for a server.

So, if you replace the disks when they fail, why throw out a motherboard if it's still working ? It's not like a CPU slows down over time, its cycles don't wear out like batteries.

So why set an arbitrary limit of five years for kit that could well do double that ?

"non-cancellable, non-returnable"

Okay good. I have one question though : the "non-cancellable" part, does that also concern the provider ?

Because, from what I've been reading here these past weeks, it's not the customers that are cancelling their orders.

The Chamber of Progress

A lobby group blatantly created for Big Tech interests. How these people manage to look themselves in the mirror in the morning is beyond me. No doubt a large infusion of cash is putting their conscience to sleep (supposing they ever had one).

I'm sure they will soon start bleating think of the children as a last resort.

But it is nice to see that the media is now putting pressure where it hurts : $100 million to operate, $15 billion in revenue.

There is no sane person in the world who can think that that is normal.

They are cooperating with the authorities

And have responsibly disclosed the situation.

One can only hope that this will aid authorities to home in on the source and get Putin to do something about them.

With all the hacker groups he has, Putin can afford to sacrifice another one.