Posts by Pascal Monett

The ideal sat-nav is one that stops the car, winds down the window, and asks directions

Re: The make-up later on compensates like tech never can provide

Yet.

Ford taking control of chip supply in Globalfoundries deal

Better late than never

The eponymous pandemic has given automakers a serious wake-up call on the necessities of controlling all of the production chain.

They're reacting for their own survival.

Boffins find way to use a standard smartphone to find hidden spy cams

Re: A good sweep team with spectrum analyzers

Those types rarely choose AirB&B to reserve a hotel room, methinks.

And if you're the type who has a sweep team available you likely don't either.

What about LAPD on a phone in LA ?

Citrix initiates 'Restructuring Program' – jobs and facilities to go

"Investors appear not to mind the new restructuring plan too much"

Historically investors have never minded people being laid off.

They have, however, greatly minded the subsequent loss of revenue that happens more often than not.

Alibaba profits plunge as Beijing's bans – and beefy competitors – bite

"we remain confident in development of China consumption"

And that is the great strength of China, which has an interior market that dwarfs that of three continents on its own.

India is the only other country with a comparable population and, therefor, market size.

And the OHSG has pushed China to become technically independant with his hare-brained idiotic schemes.

The dragon has woken, and it is stirring. We will feel its bite sooner rather than later.

Re: Winnie the Pooh

The CCP has always been ruining China.

First they did it by murdering anyone capable of critical thinking, removing vast amounts of experienced people in a horribly brutal fashion.

Then they did it with pie-in-the-sky economic rules that starved millions, to the point where they had to actually re-allow personal vegetable fields to avoid emptying the country completely.

What's happening now is a stroll in the park compared to what has already happened.

TI will splash out up to $30B on wafer fabs

And yet more fabs in the desert

I'll stock up on the popcorn while waiting for the inevitable "Fabs in Texas starved for water" article that should show up in 2023.

Mine's the one with the "Where to find water" manual in the pocket.

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

I had a somewhat similar problem

It was at the beginning of my career in IT. I was working for a self-employed engineer who had set up a test bench for industrial pumps. I was in charge of creating the UI software (in Visual Basic - sorry) that would allow the users to start or stop the bench, and see what the test status was. Everything was supposed to be automatic.

It was an impressive machine, I must say. The pumps would arrive by overhead rail. Upon reaching the proper position, a pump would be lowered for pressure testing. Tubes would be brought into place and cover the proper points on the pump. Once that was done, water was made available and the pump was set to work to ensure proper functioning. When the test was over, the system would drain, tubes would be removed, and the pump went on its merry way.

My UI was supposed to show all the steps, which I am happy to say that, after testing it for every possible scenario, it did.

Once everything was ready, we went to do the live demo. Everything went fine until a few minutes before we were supposed to finished, when the test bench froze.

I looked at the engineer. He looked at me. We hadn't moved a muscle. What had happened ?

I'll spare you the description of the 90 minutes that followed, what it boils down to is that, somehow, the big red Emergency Stop button had been pressed on the side of the test bench.

When I got back home (late) that evening, I promised myself I was going to integrate the status of that button in my UI the next day.

Streamlabs shamed into dropping 'OBS' from product name after open-source OBS Project wades into Twitter spat

"We take responsibility for our actions"

As soon as community backlash is harsh enough.

Another load of bullshit PR.

Regulators on three continents probing Nvidia's $40bn purchase of Arm, CFO confirms

The horizon is starting to get a bit crowded on this deal

So Nvidia now has Australia (IIRC), Europe, the UK, China and now the US looking into the merger.

I think some people at Nvidia must be chugging aspirin by the tub now.

Future of the three NHS bodies managing health tech in doubt after £2.1bn cash injection

Has yet to produce a business plan

Hmm, I love the smell of UK Gov IT failure in the morning.

A £300 million budget and nothing to show for it yet ? I can do nothing for that kind of money as well.

And everyone knows it won't become an issue before the spending hits £600 million, but then, with minimal effort shown, it'll hit a billion and that's when the project will really take off.

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Even if money is not an issue

A Synology DS420+ goes for around €350. Add 4 8TB SSDs at €830 a pop and you're still €1300 better off and you have a product for which bottlenecks will not occur so often.

I understand what a pet project is, but sometimes you need to look at the cold, hard numbers first.

New study demonstrates iodine as satellite propellant... in space

On the one hand : Science !

On the other hand : another excuse to put thousands more satellites into an already crowded orbital junkyard.

My heart is torn.

Magnanimous Apple will allow people to fix their iPhones using parts bought from its Self Service Repair program

"it's great to see that Apple finally agrees"

Woah there, pardner, Apple does not agree yet.

It's just mouthing the words. Wait for the acts before celebrating.

Far be it from me to actually defend Apple, but it must be said that there's not much room in a smartphone to begin with, so the components do have to be small.

It may not be practical, but it is a choice imposed by the format, not by wanting to make things difficult.

Indian PM calls on the world to save youth from Bitcoin

"Modi lauded India's technology sector for helping to address the Y2K problem"

Y2K ? Really ? It seems a bit late to congratulate people for an issue that was solved 21 years ago.

When I started reading that sentence I thought it would end in "helping to address the COVID confinement problem", but no, Y2K it was.

Has India done nothing more important since then that would be a more relevant reference ?

I'm baffled.

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

Another tale of secret dealings and shady contracts

Actually this happens all the time. Tender for a government contract ? It may be public, but if you're in that particular market it's pretty easy to spot the few clauses that guarantee that a specific company has already been chosen - no use applying.

This is done openly and everyone is aware of it, so why choose to make the negociations secret ? That's the kind of thing that is going to ensure that a gigantic spotlight is turned on and targetting the affair closely. It is the exact opposite of what is apparently wanted : to ensure that the Tuvalu government gets to quietly pick another provider.

If they had made a public offering with the criteria required to ensure many operators could apply, then they could let the application period pass by quasi-ignored by most and pick the operator of their choice at the end, no questions asked. Of course, the incumbent would whine, but everyone would expect that and the comments would be few. Mission accomplished.

Instead, Tuvalu now has the attention of the Internet world for trying to avoid attention.

Bravo.

Cisco thinks you're happy to wait ages for new kit, then pay premium prices

"customers feel they need [..] to be ready for whatever crisis the world dishes up next"

I'm guessing that mostly concerns carriers.

By now, businesses either have adapted or don't need to, but carriers were definitely caught out - especially the ones that oversold their capacity.

Korea gives Google and Apple another kick for requiring their own payment systems

It can be done

Thanks to South Korea, we now know that it is possible to make multinationals back down.

And there can be no more technical arguments about whether it's difficult or not.

Now all we need is for other countries to follow suit.

Unit4 releases connector mesh as it sinks deeper into Microsoft's 'grizzly bear' hug

Unit4 counting on Borkzilla to progress

You do realize that, the instant Borkzilla finds you a tasty enough morcel, you'll be bought out, and the second it finds you a threat, it'll cut your legs off at the knees ?

Just asking. There's ample history for that.

Survey shows XP lingers on while Windows 11 makes a 0.21% ripple in the enterprise

"could be totally reasonable if it's just from the managed company PCs"

Company PCs are the last ones, at this point in time, that are going to dally about with a new Windows release.

It took about 10 years for companies to get away from Vista, and that transition still isn't entirely finished.

Don't look to companies to bolster Borkzilla's new pet project numbers.

.00001% IMO.

Not many people know about the user agent.

Microsoft slows Windows 10 release cadence to yearly. If they're all as dull as the November Update, this is fine

Re: {Facepalm} 'Get Windows 11' nags in Windows 10 21H2, have started.

Yup.

And, once again, Internet to the rescue :

Disable Windows 11 Upgrade Using DisableOSUpgrade Registry Key

1. Type regedit in RUN or Start search box and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows

3. Create a new key under Windows key and set its name as WindowsUpdate. If the key is already present, skip to next step.

4. Now in right-side pane, create a new DWORD DisableOSUpgrade and set its value to 1

I really would like you penguinistas to realize one thing : we don't use Windows because we want to.

If the tools I needed were available on any Linux distro, I would have already changed.

So let's drop that thread, okay ?

We know Linux exists. We'll switch as soon as it is damned possible.

In the meantime, we have to work.

Re: Unfortunately, the hot-keys no longer work

That is because the new generation of developers have never used them, so they don't understand how indispensable hotkeys are.

This new generation does everything on the smartphone. When seated in front of a proper keybord+mouse environment, apparently they are lost and are desperately trying to recreate the smartphone interface.

Unfortunately for us greybeards, we know full well that a good sequence of hotkeys goes ten times faster than the mouse can hope to follow.

Seems like that knowledge is going to go the way of the dinosaurs.

'We are not people to Mark Zuckerberg, we are the product' rages Ohio's Attorney General in Facebook lawsuit

I was thrilled to read those words

But then I read about how he was only acting on behalf of investors.

Why the hell did you invest in Facebook ?

What it is doing to children and vulnerable people is not new, but you only discovered it when you bought some shares ?

Is that hypocritical, or what ?

The lawsuit should be thrown out.

40 million meeting rooms are yet to get video gadgets

Fearmongering much ?

Neither Teams nor WebEx are all that difficult to handle.

With Teams just use the browser, that avoids the installation hassle and you can use the guest invite, no personal info gathered there.

With WebEx, sure, you have to install, but you do that once, then you can connect to any room someone invites you to.

For both, audio & video are pretty easy to check and they mostly work with your default settings, so there shouldn't be need of much tinkering.

YMMV, but I really don't see a global backlash against tools that we discovered in the urgency of the first confinement. It's working now, so why change it ?

Seagate demos hard disk drive with an NVMe interface. Yup, one with spinning platters

I have recently upgraded my home PC. My new motherboard has an NVMe slot if you care to check the image, it is behind the RAM and underneath the PSU connector). I have an NVMe drive waiting for it.

Except that, there is nothing that holds the card to the slot. There is no retaining device, so the card just slots in and, if ever the case is moved or jostled in any way, the card is liable to pop out.

Very poor design in my opinion. SATA connectors have blocking pins like Ethernet, so where is the blocker on NVMe cards ?

I'm not slotting that card in until someone does something so that it can't just fall out.

But you'd still need to overwrite the now-obsolete encrtypted data.

I'm not sure there's any gain there.

Chap who campaigned to oust Nominet's CEO and chairman and reform the .UK registry is elected as non-exec director

"Turnout was 24 per cent"

That is a damn shame.

Unless the 76% that didn't bother to move their ass were in favor of the previous assholes, in which case so much the better.

Now, until everyone on the board who has worked with and approved Mark Wood is ousted, I will not be satisfied.

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

Ah, the halcyon days of tight hardware resources

Back then, you had to be competent to make a game run. The difficulty getting anything on screen was already a first hurdle and, as said here, once you had your screen you had crumbs left over for the code and data.

Nowadays, they'll just tell you that you need 16GB of RAM to run the game, but hey! there's 7,486,684,325 planets to explore !

And they're all in memory.

A 'national security' issue: UK.gov blocks Nvidia's Arm deal for now, inserts deeper probe

It's the Competition and Markets Authority.

SAP patent not inventive enough to get legal protection, judge rules

"There is no inventive concept that provides something more than the abstract idea itself"

I believe that that can be applied to about 95% of all patents today.

The USPTO should be disbanded.

US states' antitrust lawsuit against Google's advertising business keeps growing

"We will strongly defend ourselves from his baseless claims in court."

And we will watch carefully to see just how baseless the court sees those claims to be.

Your PR bullshit does not impress us.

Intel's recent Atom, Celeron, Pentium chips can be lulled into a debug mode, potentially revealing system secrets

Oh please

"one way this bug might be abused would be if a miscreant obtained a stolen laptop or notebook computer with vulnerable hardware"

If he's got the laptop it's game over, no need to fiddle with the CPU.

He can just take the disk out, slap it into a USB receptacle and read anything he wants. If it's not encrypted, it's his to read.

How is this supposed to be a vulnerability ?

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

What this boils down to

is that the uni spent £30 million to learn that they had to replace everything else before implementing a Student Lifecycle Project, which is just fancy wording for an SQL database of student grades.

Oh well, sometimes lessons are expensive.

I would have said expensive lessons are the best remembered, but somehow I doubt that the uni is going to remember anything from this.

There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression

I have a collection of toon ties (from Tie Rack). Tom & Jerry, Sheep, Doc & Wolf, Bugs, Coyote, a bunch of them.

I used to wear them to customer site back when wearing a tie was a common requirement. I got more than a few laughs out of it from customers.

These days, only manglement wears a tie, and sometimes not even them (except at banks - they'll still be wearing ties in a thousand years), so I still dress properly, but no more tie.

I almost regret that, but not quite.

During the XMas week though, I wear my XMas tree tie with Mickey Mouse on it wherever I go.

Tech bro CEOs claim their crowns because they fix problems. Why shirk the biggest one?

And they use cargo sips who burn the absolute worst, most polluting fuel possible.

One of those ships offsets 100,000 Teslas.

We need to start the cleanup there.

Yeah, but Borkzilla wants you to upgrade every two years.

Just sayin'

Cruel and unusual IT fail upstages Megan Fox. Transformers: Windows in disguise

It really is surprising

In an era where alerts abound and computers have never been under so much scrutiny, it is really surprising to see that public ad panels basically have no controlling software that decides whether or not everything is working fine before throwing an image on screen.

You'd think that ad agencies would prefer to ensure that their Windows box was able to function before activating the public panel.

Well, apparently they don't give two hoots about that.

He called himself the King of Fraud. Now this bot lord will reign in prison for years

"Zhukov boldly devised"

Um, it is a fact that people are a lot more bold when they have a keyboard between them and their actions.

If this Zhukov had had to enact something in real life, I think he would have been somewhat less bold.

So let's not get carried away with the rhetoric, hmm ? He found yet another way to screw people* out of their money. There's no boldness required.

* okay, there were advertisers, but that's one step above lawyers

Now here's HPE with the weather in Northern Europe

"help improve the accuracy of forecasts in Northern Europe"

Okay, first of all, they dreadfully need to improve accuracy. They're barely capable of forecasting tomorrow's weather properly, unless it's clear skies all over Europe in which case they just might get it right for 5 days in a row.

Second : if you have to change your forecast every hour, you're not forecasting anything. You're looking out the window and writing down what you see.

I can do that just as well.

Brit analysts formed pact to crash Autonomy's market valuation, ex-CFO tells US court

The Justice system

Apparently the best place to be when you want something to drag out until everyone is sick of hearing about it.

Google denies Gmail users an early start to the weekend after problems accessing service

"a relief for all three users"

Methinks there may bit a wee bit more, especially since I noticed, the last time I logged into my Gmail account, I was logged in to Hangouts.

It would appear that Google, in its vast goodness, has decided that, once you log into Hangouts, you can no longer log out.

I guess the top brass were tired of seeing shrinking usage, so they told the trolls in the basement to do something about that.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Optimist.

HP's solution to running GPU-accelerated Linux apps on high-end Z workstations: Rely on Microsoft's WSL2

So, video drivers under Linux still haven't gotten out of hell

Brings me back to the first days when I tried out Linux on my machine. Poking through various MAN pages, very alert to warnings about how trying the wrong settings could fry either my graphics card, my VGA screen, or both.

I still managed to find settings that worked. Then I discovered the wonder of having seven different environments available at the touch of an F key.

Heady days.

FYI: If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what

Not an excuse

"a handful of Microsoft applications use Microsoft products and technologies as part of their requirements stack"

It's a call to an Internet website.

There is zero reason for Borkzilla to force the usage of any browser to go open a web page.

It is simply not acceptable.

It's different because Steam doesn't hijack your URL link to steam.com

It is only redirecting links to the games you have installed.

I think that's pretty much a basic functionality.