Posts by Pascal Monett

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

Re: The pace of change

That pace is slowing down, and its type is evolving.

Back in the days of the first IBM PC, it took less than a year to get a more powerful processor. Intel was running full tilt on new CPU designs, and the frequency was always climbing. Every year the new model was visibly much more powerful than the last.

Then we hit the 4Ghz barrier, and there was no more easy way to wring more power out of a CPU core. So, Intel went lateral and started thowing more cores into the die. On top of that, hard disks got their own channel, instead of IDE sharing with another.

Then we got PCI express and SATA connections, making disc access a breeze.

And here we are now, with machines that are multitasking every part of their functions and control being delegated to in the most efficient way we can think of. The consequence ? This year's model is barely faster than last year's.

I used to upgrade my PC's components every year. I haven't touch my main PC in six years now. It still works fine for what I do.

That said, now I am oogling the latest CPUs and graphics cards, and sketching out my dream configuration. Hey, it's been six years, right ? ;)

The sooner AI stops trying to mimic human intelligence, the better – as there isn't any

"Experience matters"

Yeah, right up until a beancounter looks at his data and says "he costs that much !", and then your experience follows you out the door.

Never forget : the cake is a lie.

Royal Navy and Air Force get low-code bridge in UK military recruitment saga

So now it's low code

They obviously haven't the faintest idea what it is, but it's trending, so we'll ask for that.

Um, guys, low-code means you don't need a coder to write it up. You can do it yourselves. THAT'S WHAT IT'S FOR.

Tendering for a low-code "specialist" is like hiring someone to eat your food for you. You can eat it yourself.

Boeing successfully flies unmanned autonomous military 'wingman' aircraft that may become pilot's buddy

Slowly but surely

The shape of the battlefield of the future is changing. What will we end up with ? One human pilot and three drones for wingmen ? Will the squadron be counting human assets and dozens more drone assets ?

And what of communication security ? All of this has to be encrypted, otherwise the enemy could hack into the drone's comm channel and give it orders. I'm sure they have given that thought.

So the real question is : when will they remove the human element entirely ?

Japanese billionaire invites y'all to apply for an all-expenses-paid Moon trip in a SpaceX Starship – like the one that blew up today

I wouldn't mind taking a stroll on the regolith, but we're talking an entire different kettle of frozen fish and the amount of possible issues are likely an order of magnitude greater than by just flying over it.

I think that, for a first try, a successful flyby and safe return will already be a major achievement.

If Google and Apple won't help us, we'll sort it out the Linux way: 21 companies form Mobile Native Foundation

That is the power of Open Source

If you don't see what you like, then you can make it happen yourself.

Of course, at this level that's going to mean a lot of meetings and discussions, but in the end, Apple and Google just might find their influence diminished somewhat.

Obviously, if that is a risk, both of them will flock to the MNF and ensure that they have their say as well.

Google has arranged special insurance for its cloud – if you share some data with Allianz and Munich Re

Excessive access ?

If you're on Google's cloud, it already has all the access it wants.

As far as I understood, this reporting tool has nothing to do with the data. It will report on security settings. Given the unending string of hacks due to shoddy security, this just might be a good idea.

9 years after SpaceX strode into Texas village, Elon Musk floats name change for Boca Chica: 'Starbase'

Boomtown sounds fine to me

On the other hand, I have a bit of a problem understanding what the state has to do with the naming of an industrial location. For the state, what is important is the address and the size. Musk can rename it every day if he wants, I don't see that that has any impact on the state.

The wrong guy: Backup outfit Spanning deleted my personal data, claims Cohesity field CTO

"Our customers are our top priority"

Of course they are.

Until you decide that they aren't any more.

Anyway, this whole thing just demonstrates once again that you should actually read the EULA for products that deal with backing up your data. Nothing is more important than that.

That said, Spanning is definitely guilty of false advertising. I checked out their website and it is clearly stated : "With no limit on storage capacity or number of backups ". To put that on your website and then bury limits in the EULA is really bad form. Spanning is clearly spinning a lie to bring in victims customers, no doubt betting on the fact that most people don't have all that much to backup.

Sneaky and dishonest.

IBM settles £36m Direct Line insurance platform project lawsuit, after claiming Teradata tried to usurp its spot

IBM "had no one suitably qualified available."

Obviously.

IBM has spent a decade getting rid of them.

Linux Mint emits fix for memory-gobbling Cinnamon – and future version may insist on some updates

Re: May I be the first to say

Apparently, you might be the only one to say.

SAP tells investors it plans to make €5bn RISE up into its clouds with lift and shift push

"A customer [..] will roughly pay twice the amount of existing maintenance"

Ain't it nice when you can print your own money ?

Reasons to be appy: Huawei flashes figures for its App Gallery platform

"radioactive to larger software houses"

Yeah, except that Huawei has a 1+ billion population to rely on.

I'm guessing you can build some pretty big software houses on that basis.

China may not yet have a Borkzilla, but it will. And that day, you can be sure that China's Borkzilla is going to dwarf every other multinational corporation there is.

Gootkit malware crew using SEO to get pwned websites in front of unwitting marks

NoScript FTW

If ever, one day, netizens start blocking JS en masse, there will be many tears shed by all those stupid web sites that can't display a proper HTML page.

Come on, I can dream, can't I ?

Mine's the one with the no-JS, no-cookies web site in the pocket.

Perl.com theft blamed on social engineering attack: Registrar 'convinced' to alter DNS records by miscreants

A social engineering attack

"All sides understood that Perl.com belonged to Tom and it was a simple matter of work to resolve it "

If all sides understood, then how come somebody got conned into changing the records ?

I know nothing about how DNS records are managed, but if someone can get a hold of something that doesn't belong to them with a simple phone call or email, then security needs to be tightened up somewhere. My website is insignificant, but if someone managed to take it away from me, I'd be pretty pissed.

Users wail over neverending queue: Nope, not the supermarket. GitHub Actions is having a workflow wobble

"taking a number of carefully crafted workflows down with it"

Well, you rely on someone else's server to work, you get someone else's reliability.

Par for the course. Instead of complaining, get your own server.

Google seeks to placate AI researchers complaining of Big Brother-like working conditions

"The Chocolate Factory’s legal team"

That is not a legal team. That is Goebble's PR team hard at work.

There is no legal reason to replace the 'concerns' with the word 'considerations'. Legally, that has no justification.

Propaganda-wise, though, it is a very good decision.

Except that, irony, the propaganda department is working against some of the best engineers in the field, who have chosen their words with utmost care.

Team Goebbel doesn't stand a chance.

After spending $45bn on 5G licences, Verizon tells customers to turn off 5G to save battery life

"turn off 5G to save battery life"

LOL.

Just LOL.

Mine's the one with the feature phone that can last a week on one charge.

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

How about them black holes ?

Are we supposed to call them deny holes now ?

What a load of snowflakey crap.

I'll keep my blacklist, I'll keep hitting my keyboard and hanging my laundry, thank you very much.

Rookie's code couldn't have been so terrible that it made a supermarket spontaneously combust... right?

"almost an hour into the grilling"

So, if I understand correcty, they missed Step 1 in the exploration handbook : call the store and get someone to check on the server.

Had they done that, they would have noticed that they couldn't reach the store. That might have set them on a path that did not include trying to harass the junior coder for nothing.

Singapore reveals open-source blockchain COVID-test result tracker, eyes uses as vaccine passport app

"the technology is secure, private and tamper-proof"

Sure. We'll see how long that lasts.

Mine's the one with the tamper-proof brick in the pocket.

Palantir and UK policy: Public health, public IT, and – say it with me – open public contracts

Re: Nope, COVID-19 is not a catch-all excuse for backdoor deals

As has amply been demonstrated by the Trump presidency, what counts is not the law, it's the people who are in position of power.

What we need is something that can evaluate a candidate's ability to hold a political position. Once elected, said candidate would go through the evaluation process. If successful, the candidate could take the job. If not, find someone else to vote for. Voting is better than nothing, but it is obviously not good enough.

Of course, the evaluation process would have to be mandatory and unavoidable - which means I'm talking science fiction.

Apple, forced to rate product repair potential in France, gives itself modest marks

Apple TouchID sensor : made in China.

By the bucketload.

There is no reason to not be able to replace it.

Huawei to Hell: Embattled Chinese comms giant said to be revving up for a move into the electric vehicle market

Why should EVs necessarily be autonomous ?

Can't we just get electrical vehicles first ? Do we absolutely have to have to have them autonomous before we get them ?

Let's go step by step, shall we ? Give us reliable, comfortable electric vehicles that do not pollute and have batteries that are long-lasting and durable. I think that's a pretty good bar to start with already.

Once we have that nailed down, it will be time enough to get to the autonomous part.

Zuck chucks Myanmar military out of Facebook and Instagram

Woah there

"Facebook has of late increasingly shown a willingness to participate in political processes, taking a more aggressive stance on fake news during US elections, deleting President Trump's accounts . . . "

Hang on a minute, you're making it sound like Facebook took risks and made real efforts.

That is not true. El Zuck did nothing about fake news until the November election was almost about to take place. He banned Trump, yes, but only after Trump unleashed mayhem on the Capitol - far too late. And it took quite a while and a public outcry before anything was done about the Rohingya Muslim hate messages.

Don't try to sugarcoat Facebook's actions - they are almost always too late to matter.

We need a 20MW 20,000-GPU-strong machine-learning supercomputer to build EU's planned digital twin of Earth

I disagree. This is Science. It needs to be justifiable at all levels.

If the only justification you have is "it's the AI wot said so", you have no justification.

The bank of Bitcoin: MicroStrategy's share price rides high on the back of cryptocurrency investment

The only reason Bitcoin has any value whatsoever is because of blithering idiots like MicroStrategy fueling the fire.

A national currency is guaranteed by the state, banks have a strict charter they are legally obliged to adhere to, and no bank can "lose" trace of your money. The amount of checks and balances surrounding a bank account would take your breath away. If your bank account has issues, all you need to do is provide your latest statement and the bank will set things right.

Bitcoin Exchanges, on the other hand, are run either by incompetent idiots who lose everything through lack of security measures and getting hacked, or by outright criminals who planned on stealing everything from the get-go.

And you have no legal recourse.

The only light at the end of the tunnel is nationally-backed cryptocurrencies, which will hopefully be implemented with full securities and guarantees for the consumer. When that happens, funny money will become normal money, and suddenly everyone will start wondering why the heck we bothered.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre sidles in to help firm behind hacked NurseryCam product secure itself

Re: Passwords in plaintext

Yeah, but now you can say : think of the children !

Mine's the one with the RSA handbook.

Ever wondered why that one weird file keeps being included? Super sleuth TypeScript 4.2 is here

"Inferring the files of your program [..] turns out to be a complicated process."

And whose fault is that, hmm ?

If you hadn't made an OS where the default access is Admin, you might have been able to ensure that programs only write in their designated folders, instead of spunking all over the place like they have been since Windows 2.

Microsoft spearheads a whole new genre with installation on the side of a Lyon tunnel

I can explain

Une enceinte can relate to three things : a HiFi speaker, a place clearly delimited, or a pregnant being.

It's all about context. I admit it can get a bit confusing. See if you can guess these sentences below :

Cette enceinte ne fonctionne plus

Il est interdit de fumer dans l'enceinte de l'école

A cette caisse les femmes enceintes sont prioritaires

Looks like I have :)

I'll pay attention to that the next time I install Office.

Meanwhile, somebody needs to tell LibreOffice that they goofed up then.

Re: On a related subject...

Um, it's the Underground.

There aren't many drivers to worry about.

"Microsoft's internationalisation efforts"

Still needs some work, IMO.

My Windows is installed with location = France, language = English, keyboard = French.

Guess what the default install laguage is when I install new software ? French, obviously.

The fact that I specified English as my interface language apparently has no bearing on the fact that two out of three of those parameters say French, so the intern who did the code obviously decided to average out the answers to chose what language to use.

Yeah but language = English. You don't need to be an engineer to know which language to use !

Ever felt that a few big tech companies are following you around the internet? That's because ... they are

I don't see why I should use it

I use NoScript. Anything that uses JS on a site I have not authorized is dead in the water.

Not impressed.

'Meritless': Exam software maker under fire for suing teacher who tweeted links to biz's unlisted YouTube vids

"protect our intellectual property"

Your intellectual property that is blatantly displayed in public video available on YouTube ?

Is this a joke ?

You're not protecting your IP, you're trying desperately to protect your reputation, just like Diebold.

And, just like Diebold, you're going to find out that using lawsuits to silence criticism does not work.

NTT boffins reckon they’ve out-randomed current quantum random number generators

Yeah, the day we get there.

And, as for cutting through current classical crypto schemes like a knife through butter, you have to have the knife.

So, fusion or quantum : which will we get first ?

Qualcomm under fire for 'anticompetitive' patent shenanigans causing pricey UK smartphones

"higher smartphone prices"

Oh, because you want me to believe that Apple would have sold its flagship phone at $500 if Qualcomm hadn't been there ?

Pull the other one.

Revealed: The military radar system swiped from aerospace biz, leaked online by Clop ransomware gang

So, the thieves published designs of 10-year-old tech

Okay, they might well have accessed more recent designs but, on the other hand, I doubt they have the technical ability to choose designs that are old before revealing more recent ones.

Of course, the creation date of the files might render that argument moot.

If they only got their hands on decade-old tech, maybe it doesn't matter so much ? It has surely been replaced by more recent tech. Sure, it's still a bad thing for the companies involved and their customers, but it might make it easier to decide not to pay them - which, ideally, should never happen.

Obviously, even 10-year-old tech designs could be very interesting for some third parties, so yeah, it's still a bad thing. This is military hardware though, those thieves might want to start looking over their shoulders in the future. The CIA can reach pretty far when it wants to.

Thirsty work: TSMC starts trucking in water amid Taiwan drought to keep chip production lines chugging

"two to four million gallons of water per day"

So that's 7.5 to 15 million liters of pure, drinkable water that is made toxic and, apparently, gets purified before being returned to "the water supply".

I damn well hope so.

Now, if the water is being taken from the dam, used, then purified again and returned to the dam, where is the issue ?

Actually, shouldn't this whole thing be a closed loop, only topping up to compensate for evaporation ?

The plant should have a 20 million liter reservoir, with water being constantly used, purified, stored and used again.

Not doing that is a clear sign that used water cannot be purified to the level they need to use it again, meaning it's likely not water that goes back to the dam, nor is it water you'd want to drink.

And then Texas got covered in snow.

Alexa, swap out this code that Amazon approved for malware... Installed Skills can double-cross their users

"Any offending skills we identify"

The problem, apparently, are the offending skills you don't identify.

It's all well and good to have a security API defending personal information, but if anyone can ask for a credit card number without using that API then it's not much use, is it ?

Once again, a problem was recognized but the proper solution was not implemented. Solution which would have been requiring developers to submit their "Skill" (ugh, I hate that notion) as raw code, to be reviewed by Amazon drones, compiled and tested. The code review would catch things like that.

Of course, Amazon would have to hire competent coders who would spend their time reviewing code, which would be more expensive and time-consuming, but mostly more expensive. But nothing should be able to pass through that kind of filter.

UK minister tries to intervene after Government Digital Service migration mangles Ministry of Justice webpages

I wonder if they've hired some IBM people ?

Links that point to vastly different addresses, useful information hard to find and, when you finally find it, difficult to understand, yep, they must have hired an IBM consultant.

HP loses attempt to deny colossal commission to star sales staffer

Despicable

If you don't like the idea that a salesdroid can be paid a barrelful of money, then create a bonus scheme where that won't happen.

If you create a scheme where somebody can get a million bucks, and someone gets there, then you bloody pay them the million bucks.

It's simple.

Microsoft unveils swappable SSDs for Surface Pro 7+ but 'strongly discourages' users from upping their capacity

Strongly discouraged

Why ?

What Byzantine hardware and software rules has Borkzilla implemented to make it difficult to swap a disk for a bigger one ?

Since when has putting in a bigger disk ever been a problem in computing when using approved models ?

Is Borkzilla trying to insinuate that Surface Pros are factory-limited to what was installed at build time ?

So many questions, so many possible stupid answers, but no good ones.

Mozilla Firefox keeps cookies kosher with quarantine scheme, 86s third-party cookies in new browser build

"Google [..] are racing to develop various Privacy Sandbox proposals"

No need, Mozilla has a great idea. The cookie jar seems perfect to me. A jar per website, and nobody's hands in any jar they don't belong. Sounds good.

Of course, that will not be to Google's liking, but I don't give a rat's ass about that.

Pyrrhic victory: Co-Op wins £13m from IBM over collapse of £175m Project Cobalt insurance platform contract

I'm thrilled

"IBM is also pleased that the judgment reduced CISGIL's inflated damages claim to a fraction of what was claimed recognising the contractual allocation of risks "

I'm thrilled that IBM is pleased about the reduction of the payment and totally disregards the damage that this case has done to its reputation.

Although, given the current state of its reputation, I guess the damage isn't all that bad after all.

What's CNAME of your game? This DNS-based tracking defies your browser privacy defenses

Indeed : "it is possible to include an arbitrary JavaScript payload that will be executed "

No, it won't be.

SpaceX small print on Starlink insists no Earth government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities

Re: Starlink (or similar) for Mars makes sense

They could use radio ?

It worked well enough for us for a while, and actually still does.

UK's Health Department desperately seeking service provider to run IT after 'cloud-first' shift

"the government department said it has 'transformed' services"

I very much doubt that.

The only thing that has been "transformed" is the internal memorandum on how services should behave - and even then, the only change made was to replace the word "server" by the word "cloud". I don't think anyone in the high spheres of administration have an effing clue about The Cloud (TM), nor do they actually know what their services are doing on a daily basis.

But hey, UK Gov has tens of millions of pounds to spend, so . . .