Posts by Pascal Monett

Just what is the poop capacity of an unladen sparrow? We ask because one got into the office and left quite a mess

Re: Invest in mosquito screens.

Agreed. Came in to post the same.

Put a mosquito screen on your window. Problem solved.

That said, I am interested in knowing the poop capacity of an unladen sparrow. For general culture purposes, obviously.

Microsoft: Purveyors of the finest BORK since the 1990s

"whenever the topic of bork comes up, Microsoft is invariably invoked"

And yet Borkzilla is not what you decided to use.

Shame.

Apple is happy to diss the desktop – it knows who's got the most to lose

"Apple is, after all, the professional’s platform"

I'm sorry, I can't wrap my head around that phrase. Especially when, litterally in the same sentence, it is followed by "Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise".

So, the enterprise is not where the professionals are ? That's news to me.

Let's be clear about things : Microsoft is the most used desktop OS, whether you like it or not. Linux is actually what makes the Internet function, is part of the backbone of all communications, and is the spearhead of most things we send into space. It's also what makes The Cloud (TM) work - yes, even Azure. Apple is for the people who work on making things look good. There aren't that many of those, but their work is just as valuable.

Saying that only Apple has professionals is uttely ridiculous.

Conflicting messaging overshadows NHS Digital's attempts to inform public about patient data slurp

"We do not sell data. We only seek to recoup costs"

And how do you do that if you do not sell data ?

This whole mess looks to me like there are too many people in charge of "informing" the public. Each of them inform on their little circle of oversight, without any coordination whatsoever.

So it's a typical UK Gov project. Everything's fine, then.

China all but bans cryptocurrencies

20H2 ?

So you're confusing a desktop OS controlled by a single entity with a fractured mobile phone environment that is, in essence, barely controlled by anyone.

I understand how you don't get it now.

Here's your answer.

"And then there’s the Digital Yuan"

So, in essence, China is banning competition to its own funny money.

Par for the course, I guess, even though I completely agree with the ban and think all Western countries should do the same.

As for blockchain, could someone please tell me how that non-scalable technology is going to improve any economy whatsoever ?

This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook faced surprisingly tough questioning from judge

Re: Works for Apple

That's what we're going to find out.

All this is The Zucks' fault. He has set precedent in not knowing anything about his company and passed with flying colors and no consequences, so why not do the same ?

Personally, if I were judge and the CEO of a trillion-dollar company stands before me and doesn't know anything on the subject that the Court has specifically been talking about for a week, I would slap him with contempt of Court and jail him until he remembers.

Good thing for Cook that I'm not a judge.

Google to venture where Apple soared and Microsoft crashed – physical retail

No. Boris Johnson doesn't have a rash, he is a rash.

All that Lego has a purpose: Researchers find that spatial memory improves kids' mathematical powers

Re: Lego and Minecraft

Lego was my favorite childhood activity.

Minecraft is awesome as well, I introduced my daughter, nieces and nephews to it.

Despite all that, I suck at math.

Oh well.

American insurance giant CNA reportedly pays $40m to ransomware crooks

$40m to the extortionists

Unacceptable.

If they have $40 million to throw away like that, they have the money to guarantee proper backup procedures and use them.

If I were a shareholder to this bunch of clowns, I'd be screaming bloody murder at the CEO.

It took 'over 80 different developers' to review and fix 'mess' made by students who sneaked bad code into Linux

Break the law ?

What law ?

Nobody's going to jail over this. This is not a situation where the police are involved.

Maybe they should be, but that's an entire other argument.

Sorry, but you are intelligent enough to be aware of your ineptitude.

That makes you better than a lot, in my book.

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander set to ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 to the Moon

"The company's Beta rocket can loft heftier loads"

Except that it doesn't exist yet, so technically it can't lift anything right now.

Firefly has a plan for a rocket that can lift heavier loads and is working on it. Whether that rocket ever comes into existence is another question entirely.

Finally, I note with interest that Firefly's Alpha rocket is not in the list of orbital launchers maintained by Wikipedia. I wonder why ?

Help wanted, work from anywhere ... except if you're located in Colorado

Re: First thing I have to always ask

I've always found this tiptoeing around money to be incredibly annoying and stupid.

It's a job interview, not a salon chitchat. There's what I'm supposed to do, and what I get for it. It may be treated as a secret outside the room, but it bloody well isn't inside.

Europe gives SK Hynix the nod to gobble up Intel's NAND flash and solid-state drive biz

"build a total of six fabs in Arizona"

Great idea there. Arizona is the driest state of the USA. Great choice to place six plants that use millions of gallons of water every day.

I can't even begin to image the amount of tax you're not going to pay.

When humanity perishes in nuclear fire, the University of Essex's radiation-resistant robots will inherit the Earth

Hasn't this already been researched ?

We have satellites in geostationary orbit that already have to be hardened to function properly. And that giant open nuclear furnace in the sky creates a much harsher environment than a functioning nuclear power station.

All the computer equipment on the ISS is hardened, if I'm not mistaken, and it is well inside the Earth's magnetosphere.

I agree that we haven't yet created nuclear plant robot butlers, but I would have thought that the process of hardening electrical equipment didn't need that much research any more.

Holy margins, Batman: Pandemic tech prices balloon as demand outweighs stocks and suppliers get greedy

"a bit like life in general"

Please don't say that.

I need life to return to a point where my daughter can get work again and where I can bring my wife to the restaurant now and again.

Google's 'Ask me anything' on Privacy Sandbox was more about questions than answers

"keep the web as interoperable"

The web is perfectly interoperable right now. You don't have to do anything to ensure that.

Don't try to make us believe that you're trying to save the web. The only thing you're trying to save is your revenue model.

ESA signs off on contracts for lunar data relay and navigation

Satellites in lunar orbit

Do those satellites need to be smaller that what we're using in orbit around Earth ?

Due the Moon's reduced mass, of course.

I'm guessing that we can do geostationary around the Moon, but they might need to be at a lower altitude. In any case, I'm sure they'll get the details worked out. We've been managing satellites for long enough to know what to do. One might even say that there are no new technical difficulties in this project. The biggest hurdle will be, as always, getting the sats into space. Once they're there, the rest should not be a problem.

Graph databases to map AI in massive exercise in meta-understanding

"graph processing will grow 100 per cent annually to 2023"

Easy prediction.

When you're nowhere, doubling your market penetration isn't difficult.

When the market is saturated, you don't increase by 100%. You'll be lucky to increase by 5%.

Gartner remains Gartner.

Unihertz Titan Pocket: Like asking Mum for a BlackBerry and she tells you 'but we've got a BlackBerry at home'

It looks interesting

Even with it quirks, it looks interesting.

But, with the size of my fingers, that keyboard would be an exercise in frustration.

Sorry, I'll have to pass.

Beyond video to interactive, personalised content: BBC is experimenting with rebuilding its iPlayer in WebAssembly

Object-based media

As the old curmudgeon that I am, I initially reacted to this by thinking "that's another load of intellectual masturbation about how to stream a video".

But, as I read further into the article, I started to get an inkling of a notion that that could actually be an interesting development.

I don't yet know how, and I don't expect this pie-in-the-sky, perfect description to actually come into being, but I am now interested in finding out what they're going to deliver.

Of course, I'll have to use a VPN to check it out. The BBC doesn't like being viewed from outside the UK.

India ponders why just three per cent of its broadband services are wired

Re: Take care of the poverty first.

A tall order.

India definitely seems to be a land of contrast, that we can agree on.

However, given that 2020 saw millions of laptops sold in India, there are quite a few people that do have the means to use a wired connection.

And I would argue that increasing the means to access the Internet in any country is going to help alleviate poverty because it will lower the barrier to access, meaning even more people will be able to get online and find, or even create, solutions.

Not all Indians cook their meals on dung fires. Yes, there are poor people, even very poor people, for sure. I don't have the solution for that, but I do think that every little bit helps.

Frontier sued by FTC, six states for allegedly over-promising, under-delivering broadband

"has retained many satisfied customers"

Those are not the ones complaining, so that is not an argument.

And don't come complaining about how you're having trouble laying fiber in the hills. You chose the market, you're supposed to have evaluated the situation and accepted the risks.

Finally, the Chapter 11 episode speaks of incompetent management. You didn't do a proper evaluation of what you wanted to promise, you didn't evaluate the costs properly, and now you're finding things more difficult than you'd thought. Maybe you should have thought some more beforehand.

iFixit slams Samsung's phone 'upcycling' scheme for falling short of what was promised

Re: useless

Useless ? Are you saying that after two years your phone stops being able to phone ?

I have a Samsung Galaxy A3, It can phone, manage text messages, take and send pictures, show videos and use apps from the bloody store.

If I buy a new phone, I will be able to phone, manage text messages, take and send pictures, watch videos and use apps from the bloody store. It just might, additionally, be able to do that slightly better. Big whoop.

What can your brand new phone do that my "useless" phone cannot ?

"You buy a phone. Two years later, you buy another"

Nope. That's not how I do things.

I buy a phone, and I keep it until it dies.

It's a phone. I use it to <gasp> actually call people, and recieve calls.

For the rest, I have a desk, three computers and five screens, plus assorted keyboards and mice.

I'm not wasting my time squinting at a screen smaller than my hand where I have to be extra careful to push the exact right pixels not too hard with my fat fingers to send an SMS that ressembles English.

You've got the latest model ? Good for you. I don't care. I can replace the battery on mine in less than 60 seconds, no tools needed.

Blue Origin sets its price: $1.4m minimum for trip into space

Re: "One wonders what good that money could do"

Agreed. At this point in time, it may well seem to be a waste, but we should take into account the fact that, if we want space travel as a species, we want it safe, and to be safe we have to do a lot of it before making a shuttle ride the same thing as a bus ride.

I am willing to let the 0,1% fund that out of their own pockets for a change, and be the guinea pigs.

Have fun. I'll be watching the news when you go boom.

Faster Python: Mark Shannon, author of newly endorsed plan, speaks to The Register

Making Python faster

If Python is based on C, which is the fastest programming language after pure Assembler, then how can you make it faster ?

You can make any code slow if you write it badly, but there is no compiler optimization for a programmer who doesn't know how to code.

Uptime funk: Microsoft has lifted availability of Azure Key Vault to 99.99%

"And public clouds do tend to totter at the most inconvenient of times"

That is the most quintessentially British euphemism for "unreliable" I have ever seen.

Well done !

More power to web apps, cries Google, and more privacy, too

"less intrusive and more tolerable"

There is only one solution to this : stop trying to use targetted advertising.

First of all, you're targetted adverts are laughable. Either you're showing ads on something I just bought, or you're showing ads on stuff other people bought concerning the stuff I just bought.

True targetted advertising would be you recording that I just bought a light bulb, then six months later, suggesting that I might want to buy a replacement (because light bulbs are shit these days). Or if I buy a lawnmower online (because I've obviously had an aneurysm), then you wait a year and show me ads for lawnmower repairmen in my area.

If you could actually be arsed to do something useful, I might not mind so much the massive invasion of my privacy, but you can't.

So just do regular advertising. Stop trying to track me since you can't actually make it meaningful.

Of course, the hit on your bottom line will be massive, but, to paraphrase, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

Google and Samsung merge their wearable OSes, tease Fitbit baked into the combo

The platform is the problem

You have a tiny screen, a minimal amount of input vectors, and less power than what it takes to make a cup of coffee.

With those limitations, you're not going to implement a wearable version of LibreOffice. What can you possibly create that will have any interest whatsoever ?

You basically can't connect to the Internet, the power drain will kill the thing in no time.

Watch a video ? Are you kidding me ?

MP3 ? Nope. Not until you have a wearable mini fusion reactor.

Tell time, alert to emails with a Blutooth link to your phone that is in your pocket or beltpouch, use existing sensors to give information on temperature and humidity, maybe heart rythm, and that's just about the limit. No wearable is going to do anything meaningful if it's not paired with a smartphone - that's where the power is.

There's not much room to get all hot and bothered.

New Zealand hospitals infected by ransomware, cancel some surgeries

Totally agree.

Unfortunately, we're talking hospital here. Nurses have other things to do than follow security seminars on email handling. Especially when governments are notorious for cutting down on healthcare spending.

Hospital personnel have been overworked for years, it's not new.

I don't know what the solution is, but to me it should be before the email reaches the inbox. Maybe have a system that scans email contents, quarantines anything with a link for further analysis, then checks all links for acceptability before depositing them at their destination.

The point is hospitals need better email scanning because the personnel doesn't have the time to think about it. It's the email filter that needs to up its game.

"The attack disabled all IT services except email"

Ain't that a shame. It took everything down except for the vector it used to get in.

Irony, anyone ?

Glimpse of 3GHz 128-core Ampere Altra Max server processor emerges as Oracle teases more cloudy Arms

"delivering linear scalability"

Okay, I readily admit that I am not a hardware CPU geek with full credentials, but how is it justified to say that ARM CPUs scale linearly and imply that x86 CPUs don't ?

The wiki page on ARM does not mention scalability in any way.

I've seen server motherboards with 4 CPU sockets for x86 CPUs. It seems to me that that means they scale.

Could someone enlighten me ?

The Microsoft Authenticator extension in the Chrome store wasn't actually made by Microsoft. Oops, Google

"Google declined to comment [,,] about how this add-on slipped through the net"

It slipped through because the net has links that are a mile wide.

Let's be clear : Google is not there to curate the content of its Store, it's there to make money. Anything goes until someone complains. That's when Google reacts and goes fishing for a reason not to remove the app.

In this case, it didn't find any, so it removed the app.

But if you think Google is going to pre-emptively deprive itself of revenue when nobody has noticed anything, I have a bridge to sell you.

Yahoo! Japan! offers! free! comment!-moderation!-as!-a!-service! API!

Re: By any other name

I'm sorry but I do not come to that conclusion after reading this article.

Especially since this paragraph is in rather direct contradiction with your words :

The tech, styled as a "constructive comment ranking model", prioritises posts that provoke positive discussions, especially when they suggest new ideas or are insightful. Comments that mention experiences related to articles also do well.

What I do think is that, even if this API works, it will only work in Japanese, and I tend to not comment in that language, for some reason.

I'd like to see someone port that to English and implement it on Twitter.

The silence will be deafening.

UK data watchdog fines 'pandemic partner' biz £8k: It sent 84,000 marketing emails to people who'd given info for track and trace

"it had faced technical difficulties"

It would appear that it faced no difficulty in hoovering up email addresses and then deciding to "inform" said people of a "special opportunity".

Don't come crying that you don't know how to handle someone who registers twice and only consents once. You should have a procedure on how to handle that, it's nothing technical.

I think the ICO was rather lenient on this matter. It seems obvious to me that TML's intent was to get consent using a purposefully vague definition of marketing "materials", which consent it could then use as it pleased to "accidentally" email 80K+ people.

You don't accidentally email tens of thousands of people based on a misunderstanding.

This was the plan, and it will happen again.

So, who still thinks that the NHS sharing patient data with 3rd parties is a good thing ? Outside of NHS management, obviously.

What you need to know from today's Google IO: Chatty AI, collab tools, TPU v4 chips, quantum computing

"Google intends to expand access to Project Starline to healthcare and media partners"

Sorry, but all the alerts go off when reading that.

Google is the last company I want accessing my medical records.

Business-intelligence-company-turned-Bitcoin-addict MicroStrategy grabs another $10m crypto-coin fix

It's not a bubble, it's a pyramid scheme

Those that got in first have the most coins, and all the (rich) idiots that came in later are just there to position themselves to cash in on the craze.

Not a single one of those billionnaires "believe" in funny money. What they believe in is the same thing as those scams hyping penny stocks : push many people to buy, the price goes up, you make out like a bandit.

Bitcoin has reached dizzying heights of value because of all the billionnaires throwing money at it and thus validating it in the eyes of Joe Schmuck.

Joe Schmuck needs to realize one thing : transfer fees are currently at $13.44.

So, that Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza you buy for fifteen bucks ? You can almost double the cost when you pay with funny money - if Pizza Hut takes it.

So, you tell me how great BitCoin is now.

I pay with VISA. If the cost is fifteen bucks, I'm charged fifteen bucks.

For that, I don't mind working with The Man.

Ex-Apple marketing bigwig tells Epic judge: Our revenue-sharing model is designed to stop money laundering

Money laundering, sure

And then spout some R&D expenses that look like real money.

And then mention a public event sponsored by and in the only interest of Apple, which has fuck all to do with the 30% extortion rate of the Apple Store (and I don't care if Apple is not the only one, it's extortion, period).

Since you're full of bullshitnumbers, how's about you give us the cost of actually running the Apple Store - which has no need of R&D - vs the returns you get from it ?

Hmm ?

Yeah, fat chance, I know.

I have said and I maintain : 5% is more than enough.

Colonial Pipeline suffers server gremlins, says it's not due to another ransomware infection

"but then opted to restore from its own backups anyway"

Great.

So you rewarded criminals for nothing.

I hope that gets put on your tombstone.

Us? Pwn SolarWinds? With our reputation? Russian spy chief makes laughable denial of supply chain attack

So, it's not the Russkies because of something the NSA did a decade ago

Yeah. Perfectly logical argument there. Nothing to say to that, apparently.

But, by that logic, it's the Russkies because Klaus Fuchs gave Soviet Russia all the data on atomic bombs they needed to make one, sparing them years of research and tons of money.

Checkmate.

Come on Naryshkin, you bloody well know that the information not made public does not exonerate you.

We're not talking about Huawei motherboards, we're talking about high-level spy stuff. The US is not going to say how it knows because that's classified.

Huawei motherboards are not classified. They are available to the public. If any one of them had indeed been suspiciously modified, we'd have a pic by now.

We don't, so that's bullshit.

You, however, have no such validation. You're just spreading bullshit as well.

We'd love to report on the outcome of the CREST exam cheatsheet probe, but UK infosec body won't publish it

We can confirm

"We can confirm that there are currently no senior staffers from NCC Group that hold key positions at CREST. "

And I can confirm that there is no need for someone from one company to hold "key positions" in another company for there to be, shall I say, parallel communication channels.

It is entirely illogical to withhold the report on an investigation to "protect whistleblowers". You just need to redact the parts that give identifying information about them.

What this is demonstrating is that CREST is intent on not revealing any information on its internal functioning, which already says damning things about what goes on.

Campaigns propose new rules to protect contractors from rogue umbrella companies

"[Umbrella companies are] allowing themselves to operate outside the law"

This is textbook capitalism. Never mind that the law is imperfect, this is the demonstration that capitalism does not, in fact, regulate itself. It operates at the very limit of what is legal, forget about moral.

Capitalism requires regulation. In this case, a company that purposefully waits until the employee can no longer easily go before a judge should be automatically fined the amount of money withheld, forced to pay said employee and pay the bill for treating the whole affair.

It is incredible that there are people who actually dream up these kinds of schemes, but the only reason they succeed is because the law is not clear enough about penalites.

Clear that up and the hustlers will have to comply. You need to nail them to the wall first, though.

Let us not forget that the HMRC is currently incapable of properly determining its own IR35 rules, so companies are not really at fault on this matter.

Until the day HMRC can clarify 100% of cases, companies can only do with what they are given.

Are you ready to take a stand? Flexispot E7 motorised desk should handle whatever you dump on it – but it's not cheap

"Disgusting cable management"

Do you want me to send a pic of my cable management ?

Yours is positively sparse in comparison.

Don't ask my wife about it, though.

Indonesian web giants Gojek and Tokopedia merge to create Asian super-app

2% of Indonesia’s GDP

That's nothing to sneeze at. And that's a lot synergy, going forward.

This group appears to have already sewn up a neat package with financial and delivery across the board. Amazon, you've got a threat on the horizon.

Apple sent my data to the FBI, says boss of controversial research paper trove Sci-Hub

"You have NO privacy. Get over it"

Scott, I think that you are going to learn the hard way that privacy is on the rise now. You're part of the clique that has been plundering our lives gratis for long enough, and telling us to just accept and bend over is, quite frankly, more than insulting.

Nice redirection on the government though, unfortunately the government is less than half of the problem. Google, Facebook, Apple and Android are not government institutions, or maybe you forgot that when you tried to blame the current situation on the electoral process.

But don't worry, we are on the path of corralling you Big Tech guys back into the pen you belong. It will take some time, granted, but GDPR has already shaken up your world in a major way, and it's not going to stop soon.

Privacy will be ours, get over it.

Mammoth grab of GP patient data in the UK set to benefit private-sector market access as rules remain unchanged

NHS Digital is without a CEO right now

According to Wikipedia, they're looking for a new CEO to replace Mrs Wlkinson who is already gone. I'm not sure that that is a good sign.

For the rest, the wiki paints a reassuring picture of the organization, but hey, it's a UK Gov IT project, what could possibly go wrong ?