* Posts by Pascal Monett

18004 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

DOGE geek with Treasury payment system access now quits amid racist tweet claims

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FAIL

"I was racist before it was cool"

Racism has never been cool.

Go back to where you belong, Nazi Germany 1939.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

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FAIL

Typical Borkzilla

"Microsoft's intention for the initial launch was to pit the machines against Apple Macs 'in terms of performance and efficiency,' "

Bunch of morons. Redmond cannot fight Cupertino in terms of hardware because Apple doesn't have the same customer market.

Apple's market is artists, composers and other assorted artistic types.

Borkzilla's market is businessmen, Fortune 1000, bankers and home users.

Trying to pin the advantage on hardware just demontrates that you haven't evolved sine Y2K.

Hmmm. That explains a lot actually.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

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FAIL

"a total duration of 32 minutes"

Whoa there.

We're talking about breakfast.

3 minutes in boiling water and you're done.

I don't have 30 minutes to wait for an egg.

Uber CEO warns robotaxis can't find a fast route to commercial viability

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Ah, Uber

The sexual harassement, legal cheaters and grifters of the world.

Whatever you say, I only think one thing : fuck you.

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

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Stop

"an AI-generated explicit image posted to a bike blog"

This nonsense needs to be stopped.

Pseudo-AI should not be allowed to publish anything anywhere.

It's not an opinion if it was generated by a hallucinating data center.

I actually prefer reading nonsense from AManFromMars (not that I do, with the years, I have developed a very efficient visual filter, but still).

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

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Tesla

I live in France.

If I wished to buy a Tesla (spoiler : I don't), apparently I have to go near Strasbourg to get it.

That's a 2-hour drive, which someone else has to do because I'm supposed to come back with my car. So that's two people saddled with four hours of their life just shuttling to and back from a given point.

Then, there's the fact that there are absolutely zero Tesla garages. There's nowhere I near me I can bring the car if I find a problem. If the problem is serious enough, that means that I have to pay to get the car transported back to Strasbourg.

Are you kidding me ?

Not to mention the price of replacing the batteries when they're worn out.

Not to mention that, if ever the car gets into an accident, there's a fair chance that the insurance inspector will declare that it is totalled, and I've lost everything. Insurance be damned, they won't buy me a new one.

Meanwhile, Toyota does great hybrid cars, and there's BYD that has an impressive lineup - and dealerships across France which also do repairs.

I'm very happy that Tesla has had such a success, but when I pay over €50K for a car, I prefer to be able to get it within 30 minutes, and have it serviced within 30 minutes.

My Audi works fine because my garage is 30 minutes away and they have the parts required and the expertise to handle it.

And the battery only costs €120 to replace.

That's kind of important at a time when we all appear to being going to war with China, which is the only country making batteries at this point.

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Re: One piece of anecdata

Keep us posted on how well you manage to resell it.

I'm genuinely curious, because I'll be damned if I buy a car that needs a $12K battery upgrade.

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Tasteless, but I like it.

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Why on Earth would they go looking for stuff outside of their comfort range (not to mention intellectual capacity) ?

You have to have courage to learn new things.

Education doesn't stop at school, but only the intelligent understand that.

Robocallers who phoned the FCC pretending to be from the FCC land telco in trouble

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Robocallers getting punished always pleases me

I just hope they don't squirm out of paying the fine . . .

DOGE latest: Citrix supremo has 'read-only' access to US Treasury payment system

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Re: jesus

Yeah. Gotta hand it to the Orange Turnip, he's learned a lot since last January 6.

Now he's staged a coup and nobody can do anything about it.

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Because that horned guy is too busy being pardoned to give a shit.

Microsoft's final Exchange Server 2019 update still missing as support deadline ticks down

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Trollface

Re: Ms have struggling for some years with Exchange Server…

Um, slight correction there : Redmond has always struggled with the Exchange server.

Boeing, Boeing, burned: Over half a billion dollars by Starliner in 2024

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WTF?

"John Mulholland, who had led the Starliner program until 2020"

Um, so they're bringing back the guy they threw out already ?

And that is supposed to be good thing ?

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

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I don't get called after hours, but . .

When I was contracting for a rather important company in Luxembourg, I was part of the IT team and thus part of the Helpdesk ticket system.

What I always adored was the guy filing a ticket at quarter to five on a Friday and, of course, there were never enough details to fully understand the problem and correct it.

Invariably, when I called his desk to ask some questions about the issue, he was already gone.

Well if he doesn't care that much about his ticket, it can wait for Monday.

Intel knocked off global chip revenue top spot after rotten 2024

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Re: Making America Great Again! Really???

Where he always is when the shit hits the fan : behind an impenetrable legal wall that prevents him from being implicated in any way.

He is responsible for more bankruptcies than a Mafia don, but he has never lost money because of that since it was always the schmucks who trusted him that paid out of their pockets (eh, Giuliani ?).

Ireland's AI minister has never used ChatGPT but swears she'll learn fast

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Curious

I find it curious how, just when we've learned that the Chinese have apparently a better AI solution than the West does, there is a sudden acute interest in ChatGPT and associated AI products at the government level.

Um, guys, it was there last year.

Is this a harbringer of a massive pork barrel in the making ?

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

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There is no reason for Windows 11

There is nothing there that couldn't be patched into the supposedly last ever version, except that the Board needs to see its pile of cash increasing and has imagined these totally artificial excuses to enforce it.

The problem is that Redmond is not a government, and users will see their own interests before the Boards' desire to acquire yet more money.

Not even Nvidia's Jensen Huang can talk President Tariffs out of chip import taxes

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"without proper legislative review"

Welcome to the new order.

UK govt must learn fast and let failing projects die young

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Re: Know what you're aiming for

Not to mention some sort of education concerning what has already failed (most of them) and what has succeeded (not very much).

But that would, in turn, require not favorising some other minister's cousin, so . . .

Ontario responds to Trump tariff by pitching Starlink deal into the trash

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Re: denying the uniquely Jewish experience of the Holocaust

I'm sure the 3.3 million Soviet POWs (scroll down to Table 3) and the 1.8 million Poles that were killed as well (among many others) would slightly disagree with that assessment.

But hey, what's a little fact to stand in the way of ignorance ?

Intel rakes in €515M from EU after ancient antitrust fine nixed

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No longer, indeed.

I still uphold the ideal, but the eurocrats have ruined it.

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

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Re: almost everything people do on their PC now works just fine under Linux

True.

But, aside from Linux users, who knows ?

Windows 11 stages a comeback – still miles behind older sibling

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"difficult to buy a PC without AI silicon"

That doesn't mean that people will actually want to use said "AI" silicon.

Clippy was largely ignored. There's no reason, except the expectations of Redmond's Board, that people will flock to this new AI Clippy.

But hey, go on throwing money and resources at this abomination. Since when had Borkzilla ever learned from experience ?

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

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Thumb Up

"period costume with the knife and marlinspike"

Awesome.

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

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Trollface

886 cans of spam

Who knew that spam could be so devastating ?

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

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Re: Sleepy Shores

Indeed.

Beancounters are not the ones to think of successful new products.

Meanwhile, "The board remains intensely focused ". Gosh, what a surprise. That bunch of suits needs to find someone that will give them their next quarter of share returns.

They don't give a flying one about the tens of thousands of people who are trying to work at their company . . .

Google to Iran: Yes, we see you using Gemini for phishing and scripting. We're onto you

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FAIL

So, AI is not a gamechanger ?

You might want to tune your violins properly.

On the one hand, you are touting your AI thingamajig as the best thing since sliced bread, and now you're saying that it is not that good.

Communication needs to be consistant.

What better place to inject OpenAI's o1 than Los Alamos national lab, right?

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FAIL

"protect the US power grid"

The only thing that will protect the US power grid is getting its network secured and off the general Internet.

Anything else is fluff and pseudo-AI is not going to help.

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

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We are not alone

We can't be. The Hubble Deep Fields experiment proves that, whatever point in the sky you look at, there's a galaxy somewhere out there.

A galaxy. Millions upon millions of star systems. And we now know that most stars have planets.

There is life out there. It's just that there is a vanishingly small chance that we ever communicate with it, let alone meet it.

Microsoft signs eviction notice on Dev Home

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Indeed.

Google has form in that area as well.

Spending watchdog blasts UK govt over sloth-like progress to shore up IT defenses

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Trollface

All those reports and they still can't get it right

It would seem that there is a wealth of knowledge about what is insufficient, and no drive to correct the issue.

I guess it's normal : civil servants are there to generate reports, not work, and ministers are certainly not there to stick their necks out and take risks (cf Yes Minister).

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

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Pareille. Je viens de faire un tour chez Lucienne. Je lui ai posé trois questions et les réponses n'avaient rien à voir.

C'est censé être amusant de répondre à côté de la question ?

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

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the Theosophical Society

. . has now met reality. And it bites.

An interesting article.

I will have no legacy to leave, I am but a mere business programmer. In the best case, in twenty years from now, someone will be tasked with reviewing some code and find my name in the author string.

I don't care. I have a loving wife and a daughter that adores me, and that is what is important to me.

If, however, I were an artist, I might have some issue with the legacy of my work. That said, if the Internet Archive is a Good Thing(TM), apparently YouTube does a great job keeping artists' work alive, so all is not lost.

You probably have more CIO experience than the incoming White House CIO

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So, blockchain and Palantir

Sounds like the perfect scum to fit in with this government.

US AI shares battered, bruised, and holding after yesterday's DeepSeek beating

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"will obviously deliver much better models"

Yes, of course.

But you don't need $500 billion any more, now do you ?

Think harder.

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

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Not really, no.

It's like a sinkhole.

We're all wondering when it will drag us in.

SAP extends support deadline for getting off legacy software – in very special circumstances

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"SAP has confirmed"

. . . that it will keep bilking its indentured slaves for as long as possible a little longer without completely disrupting their backend.

How nice.

Fear of the unknown keeps Broadcom's VMware herd captive. Don't be cowed

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Nice argumentation

Except for the fact that there are at least two major companies that have already taken stock of the situation and given Broadcom the finger.

There will be more.

40 years ago, classified Shuttle mission foreshadowed Challenger's fatal flaw

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Interesting point.

Goes to show that armchair engineers are about as useful as armchair generals.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

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Stop

Sorry, can't agree with you

The UI for any car is pretty simple : there's the steering wheel, blinkers, lights, gas pedal and brake. The rest is fluff.

Managing a computer, installing programs, managing disk data and folders, that is an entire other ball game.

I know a lot of people who can't manage sorting out their Inbox, for Pete's sake.

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Thumb Up

Mint FTW

I can't wait to get rid of Redmond's bloated mess, but that will have to wait until I'm retired.

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

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Holmes

"unforeseen technical complexities"

In other words, the people who were responsible for the specifications fucked up. That seems to be a regular occurence within UK government structures.

If you are designing a framework which is supposed to work country-wide, you can't content yourself with the opinions of old farts who don't know how things work. You need to gather the needs of the people who will actually work with the product and are expected to deliver something.

I have 30 years of experience in designing and implementing software products. I obviously start with the stuffy ole farts who declare what they think is what they need. Then I go talk to the people who actually do the job, and make sure that the final product responds to their needs.

The old farts won't know the difference anyway.

US freezes foreign aid, halting cybersecurity defense and policy funds for allies

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Re: if it forces European leaders into self sufficiency

I don't like Trump and I don't trust his coterie of criminals in high positions in any way, but indeed, if this finally forces the Euromafia to do its job properly, then I'm for it.

Funds for cyberdefense ? Since when is the US responsible for cyberdefense in other countries ?

Oh, Cisco. Hmmm. Well, maybe a bit, then . . .

AI facial recognition could sink this murder probe

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Facepalm

"Clearview doesn't want to come defend its technology in court"

Well that says it all, doesn't it ?

On top of that, who are these Keystone cops who take facial recognition from one video to accuse someone of a crime they had a record of on another video ?

They found a gun. Well duh, it's the USA. You can find a gun almost anywhere there. Would be a lot easier if guns were forbidden, eh ?

So, did the gun match the bullets ? Did it ? Because I believe we have actual reliable technology to determine that. And if it did, then screw this facial recog stuff, that guy is guilty.

But did the gun match the bullets ?

Google takes action after coder reports 'most sophisticated attack I've ever seen'

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Interesting

Some truly up-to-date scum, there. Worth paying attention to.

As for passkeys, they're a brilliant idea until your device is stolen/broken.

Then what do you do to recover you account ?

A password is easy to replace. My biometric data, or the private key stored on the phone I just dropped into water, is not.

Citrix slated to axe its Technology Professional program

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Facepalm

"the needs and priorities of our key customers"

Oh. So you don't consider all of your customers as key customers.

And you've just told them that to their face.

AI agents? Yes, let's automate all sorts of things that don't actually need it

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"We know bad actors may try to misuse this technology."

But we're ready to make money off of that as well.

Tech stocks tank as US AI dominance no longer a sure bet

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Re: Wishful ThinkingTM is not a good basis for policy

No, but apparently it's the only policy in use these days.

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

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Coat

Sieze it and scrap it

If it's a scrapheap, you'll at least get some metal out of it and it will be one less shadow ship that Putin can count on.

It's not like Malta is going to go to war.

Okay, nurse, I'll go take my dried frog pills . . .