Posts by Pascal Monett

AWS admits to 'severely impaired' services in US-EAST-1, can't even post updates to Service Health Dashboard

"severely impaired"

Yay !

Once again the thing that high-flyers got insane bonuses out of to move the company to The Cloud (TM) has fallen flat on its face and millions are impacted.

Well done !

One day, you'll learn.

One day.

Dell reports green shoots in enterprise infrastructure biz after seven consecutive quarters of shrinkage

"how the macro uncertainty plays out"

Wow.

I bow before this piece of business-speak transforming a world pandemic into a beancounter's hedge bet.

Congratulations, really, in not mentioning in any way that people are dying while still hinting that it could, in some way, affect your bottom line.

Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs

"a single large Bob blob"

A fitting description.

Ad banned for suggesting London black cabs have properties that prevent the spread of coronavirus

Agreed

I fail to see what the problem is with keeping to oneself.

If I'm out and about, especially these days, it's because I have somewhere to go and something to do. Spending dozens of minutes in conversation is not on the schedule.

Yes, I'm not a complete troll (getting there though) - if I meet someone I recognize I will politely ask how they're doing and give the basic responses, but if I want a lengthy conversation I prefer it in a more relaxed environment, i.e. my living room or theirs.

With a glass of something, preferably. And some munchies.

Revenues are up, the boss is about to give his keynote, and results are due. Time to sell shares, says Salesforce CFO

CEO selling shares

I'm sorry, but if you are the CEO, selling shares is not a good sign. It either means you aren't paying yourself enough, or it means that your confidence in your own company isn't worth hanging on to your shares.

Neither of those choices reflect well on the company.

I resent the Wall Street attitude of thinking that shares are just a short-term investment. Personally, I think that, if you buy shares in a company, it's supposed to mean you believe in it and want to fund its development. That means that you don't sell your shares two weeks later.

There should be a law stating that shares must be kept for five years before being able to sell them.

but don't worry - it's just my opinion.

Comcast to impose 1.2TB-a-month broadband download limits across more of America from next year

France here. 1Gbps up and down, €52/month.

There is no "other" definition of unlimited.

Mall of duty: Black Ops. No, you're not a customer, you're just an ad audience metric

"discern both gender and age range"

I call shenanigans.

Facial recognition is fraught with failure ; there is largely enough proof of that for me to utterly disbelieve that a computer program can reliably tell if a face belongs to a man or a woman, and even less what age range the face is in.

But hey, it's marketing so who cares ?

MongoDB loses its mind with marketing budget movie mania: Yep, it's choose-your-own-adventure Hackers with drop-down menus

I second that.

Just reading the review made my head spin.

What dreck.

Considering the colonisation of Mars? Werner Herzog would like a word

Survival

I agree that we do have trouble managing the environment properly. I sincerely hope, for the sake of my child and all the children of the world, that we will change our ways and be capable of living on our beautiful planet without destroying it and ourselves.

But, even if we do, we still have to find another home, lest we become the next dinosaurs when (not if) that rock comes blazing down.

The survival of our species demands that we colonize other worlds. We certainly can do it in a respectful manner as far as natural resources are concerned. We have the technology, and the tech that we're missing we will create - I am certain of that.

We are not that bad, it's just the news that makes us look like we are terrible. We should expand. Not like locusts, but like stewards - responsible and respectful of Mother Nature and her resources, and always in awe of the wonders of our Universe.

Apple's global security boss accused of bribing cops with 200 free iPads in exchange for concealed gun permits

Re: who are you to decide

And who are you to decide that companies should have armed SWAT teams at the ready in case some nutcase comes in with a handgun ?

I'm sorry, but the USA is not a reference as far as guns are concerned. In most countries, nobody needs a concealed carry license because only criminals have guns and that means the police KNOW WHO TO SHOOT.

Normal people don't need guns. Companies don't need guns. The rare cases of some fucker charging in with a loaded weapon would be remarkably less common if your shithole country didn't have three guns per citizen.

Mad Max is not a documentary.

Why do Apple employees need to carry guns ?

Is Apple really that paranoid that it wants its security personnel to be armed ?

What's next, Apple is going to buy armored cars to patrol its grounds ?

This is mental. Having business secrets is one things, arming your personnel with guns is another thing entirely.

There is nothing National Security at Cupertino, no matter what the bigwigs think or how many billions are in the bank.

Social isolation creates craving in the same brain region as wanting food or addictive drugs, study finds

"Cravings for social interactions"

What is that ?

Seriously, what ?

I work from home, these days, or from my freelance office. Social interactions ? Outside of giving me the specifications of what I need to program, I don't need any. They are more of a nuisance than anything else because they keep me from concentrating on my programming.

The only social interaction I need is the customer telling me what he wants, then thanking me for the job when I'm done. Outside of that, Mondays and Fridays is game night with my two best friends, the rest of the week is my wife and daughter, and that is all I need.

Yes, I'm a cave troll. My wife is fine with that.

Cut-price Microsoft 365 seats mark Small Business Saturday – but only US firms need apply

"where one places trust in the company's cloud"

Given the long list of cloud failures, the only people who could "put their trust" in The Cloud (TM) are the ones who will get their bonus and then exit to other pastures to start over again.

Study: While text-generating AI can write like humans, it lacks common sense

Re: you could argue that our brains are doing exactly the same thing

Allow me to disagree. A human brain is, currently, capable of infinitely more complex evaluations and calculations than even our most powerful supercomputer - the only thing is that it is restricted, so to say, to our daily life.

There is no computer that can recognize a face in dubious lighting in less than a quarter of a second, yet billions of humans do it every day, whatever the weather conditions or lighting conditions - unless there is no light, in which case I plead that no supercomputer would do better anyway.

I believe that we might, one day, invent AI. As in Asimov's vision. To do so, we're going to need to understand how our own brain works - something we still cannot fully explain.

Because if we want to emulate intelligence, we need to grep the best example Nature has given us. Until then, we have zero chance of getting there.

When are they going to stop pretending ?

We don't have AI. What we have is statistical analysis machines.

You can manipulate statistics all you want, you won't get common sense out of it.

It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon

Re: I sincerely doubt that this deal will be offered again

I certainly hope it won't. Being a so-called "part of EU" without espousing the currency and insisting on certain privileges is not something I will ever agree to.

You want to come back ? You're number 47 and you take your place in the line.

I suspect we'll be talking about that in 50 years or so.

Imagine things are bad enough that you need a payday loan. Then imagine flaws in systems of loan lead generators leave your records in the open... for years

A bad code push ? Really ?

"an email address and a URL parameter "

That is not a bad code push, that is 1990s Internet coding.

We have come quite a long way in 30 years, thank you for catching up.

Crooks social-engineer GoDaddy staff into handing over control of crypto-biz domain names

I don't think we need more demonstrations of that. It's proven. We know.

Frenchman who wanted to 'smash a guy's face in' fined €135 – despite correctly filling out paperwork stating why he left home during lockdown

I really don't get it

Management decides it prefers to pay you to do nothing instead of giving you the boot.

In what world does that make financial sense ?

Yes, I realize they're hoping the person will quit - but there's no guarantee and, guess what ? The job market is a harsh place. You leave, you get no support. If you're fired, you might get support.

Nobody is going to quit a job voluntarily without having another one lined up, and these days, jobs are in short supply.

So management is basically saying that it agrees to waste money on a worker not working to avoid paying the penalty of firing the person.

I think that a beancounter needs to compute how long that is beneficial to the company and set a date by which the company has started to lose money on the scheme.

I work therefore I ache: Logitech aims to ease WFH pains with Ergo M575 trackball mouse

For work, I can agree. Personally, I have been using cordless mice for ages now and I'm quite used to it, so feel no need to change. But for gaming there is no substitute - especially in the FPS genre. You need to move that mouse to precisely where you can blow the zombie's head off and a regular mouse becomes instinctive, natural - no trackball can compete.

Marketers for an Open Web ask UK competition watchdog to block launch of Google's anti-tracking Privacy Sandbox

"people's changing expectations around how data is collected"

People's expectations are not changing. No one is using the Web and expecting to be hunted and tracked like a wild animal. Most people absolutely do not realize what is going on behind that FaceBook icon.

The only thing that is changing is that some people are now telling the others what is happening, so people are waking up and deciding to not allow their lives to be utterly plundered.

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

"cavalier treatment of critical files"

I think that may be a bit exaggerated. If there was no automation, that means that there was a lot of work and probably not enough people to do it, ergo the ones doing the work were stressed and had many things on their plate at the same time. On top of that, there was apparently more than one person with authority to change critical files - a sure way to accumulate big problem-making errors.

It's easy to make mistakes in an environment like that.

China offers world its COVID QR Code movement passport at G20 Leaders' Meeting

Exactly. With all the hoopla around Huawei for the past four years, I can really this becoming a worldwide standard - not.

Man, if the US has spouted "national security" concerns about TikTok, then what is it going to say about this ?

EU says Boeing 737 Max won't fly over the Continent just yet: The US can make its own choices over pilot training

Re: EASA are not accepting FAA certification

What will really be interesting is seeing how the other worldwide certification bodies will now view the FAA's decisions in future.

I think this is a landmark that will see the FAA no longer trusted by default - and that is going to be a hard swallow for the FAA and the US Government in general.

Internet Archive to preserve Flash content for posterity with Ruffle emulator

Ruffle : interesting

My wife is a school teacher. She's very worried about the disappearance of Flash because many, many useful educational tools have been made in Flash. The first time she saw a warning on her browser about Flash being decommissioned, she immediately came to ask me about solutions.

At the time, I didn't have any. I told her that, unless the website made an effort to convert the content to HTML5, it was going to be unusable.

Now, there might be a solution for her and her colleagues. I will be following the evolution of this tool closely.

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

Re: a perfectly understandable error

When it happens once or twice, yes, but when it happens every day without fail, it is no longer an error and the gentle education needs to be upgraded to cattle-prod instruction.

That said, it would have probably been beneficial for the PFY to hang around a bit in the morning to witness just exactly how she managed to mangle her desktop icons like that every single day. By catching her red-handed, the lesson would have likely had more impact.

How Apple's M1 uses high-bandwidth memory to run like the clappers

Re: it was really very well designed for somthing that old

Of course it was really well designed. You're talking about an era when Boeing employed redundancy, when computer engineers were actual engineers and when said engineers knew what was going on electrically in their designs.

And they tested their designs before selling them.

So now Apple had made it's entire RAM space shared

I seem to recall not so long ago that Intel had a big problem with its CPU architecture that could allow programs to access kernel memory, and many people were all in tizzy about it.

Now, Apple brings a system-on-a-chip that shares all its memory space.

Is there no problem with that ?

Uncle Sam passes comms act that sets aside $750m for the development of OpenRAN

"help support alternatives to equipment from Chinese bogeymen Huawei"

Okay, so when Huawei starts making equipment based on OpenRAN, what's your new excuse going to be ?

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

It will have consequences. Given that he will have learned nothing, he'll do it again.

And next time he might not be so lucky.

Yes, in France at least, it is the case. Just not only for young men. It's a fact that young people have the worst accidents, statistically speaking, so it costs more to insure them.

They get around any discrimination cases by simply charging more for anyone who hasn't been insured for, I think, five years. Given the drive to have a car, people typically get their license at around 18, but if you wait until you're 40, you'll be paying the high price until you're 45.

Google tells Chrome extension devs to declare their code's usage of personal data

Still, it's nice to see them at least mouthing the words

Of course, I fully expect Google to lead the way by implementing those disclosures in its own products.

Now, if only I could get rid of some of those infernal un-stoppable Google apps, I'd just might start being happy about having a smartphone.

Microsoft emits Preview 3 of next-gen WinUI framework, says Linux support 'is not off our roadmap'

Get DirectX on Linux, please

I don't care about your UI, but if you finally get around to making DirectX Linux-compatible, then gaming on Linux will surge ahead and my retirement will be bliss.

You have ten years to figure it out, no stress.

Compsci guru wants 'right to be forgotten' for old email, urges Google and friends to expire, reveal crypto-keys

Um, in a word : no

You send me a mail, it becomes mine to do with as I please, and the fact that you're the one who sent it is not and never will be deniable.

What kind of stupid idea is that anyway ? The right to be forgotten concerns news articles on people who didn't them and would like the article to be removed from search engine results.

That is a far cry from an email situation. I know you sent it, you know you sent it. You might regret sending it, but you did. No use denying it five years later.

Epic Games brings its Fortnite fight with Apple to Australia

30%

That is not a commission - that's extortion.

UK's Manchester University seeks integrator to lead fiddly Oracle Financials upgrade

Re: Cloud not optional

It's an "upgrade" - they're already screwed.

Alleged Ponzi mastermind on the run from FBI hid in lake with sea-scooter, collared after he surfaced half-hour later

"pay back the millions they owe"

As if that had a chance to happen. They've spent the money, nobody is getting anything back.

The only money left is in the house and, if he was smart enough to put it in his wife's name (probably not), not even that.

VMware names virtual firewalls as first workload it will offload to SmartNICs

Fundamental principle ?

Haven't you heard ? It's almost 2021 - we're following Boeing's stellar lead and are getting rid of those now.

Now the goal is to ensure that the NSA has easy access to everything and, if anything goes wrong, we blame it on China.

Tablets and Chromebooks are hot, towers and desktops are not: El Reg combs through Q3 PC numbers

Re: that's only for cooling

Nope. It's also for the 28" widescreen to play on in 3184x2600 pixels, plus the secondary 26" widescreen to keep an eye on open connections, stats and, eventually, a YouTube video.

The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised

I have opted out

I lost my job in 2009, it took me three years to get another one.

During that time, I quickly got fed up with the news. In France, it's full of disasters, catastrophes, horrible things and political grandstanding. It is just depressing, there's never anything good and they never actually explain anything (especially when it's economic). News on the radio is almost worst - it's shorter, but it repeats every hour, so you hear the same horrible things several times per day.

So, since that time, I got into the habit of only turning on the TV for the shows I wanted to watch. Except that, they've shifted the start of everning programs to later and later hours. It used to be that the first film started at half past eight, now it starts around ten past nine. My wife started complaining that she wasn't getting enough sleep, so we adopted a 24-hour shift. I'd record what we wanted to watch, and we'd watch it the next day at 7:30 - on our schedule.

Now, I have found the ideal solution. It's called CapTVty. It's a utility that peruses the Replay section of French TV channels and allows you to download the show, whatever it is. And, cherry on the cake, Replay does not include commercials.

So now I can peruse yesterday's broadcasts at leisure, convert the downloads to DVD format, bung them on a USB key and we can all watch ad-free shows on our time schedule.

Bliss.

KDE maintainers speak on why it is worth looking beyond GNOME

“There was really nothing good one could say about it, but it was popular.”

I'm sorry, but I followed Windows since DOS 1.0 (still have the manuals).

Windows was a revolution for the user. Sure, technically it might well have been a mess, however as far as maintenance is concerned, the ini and sys files were a blessing. It has never been easier to "reinstall" Windows - all you needed was a backup of you .sys and .ini files and you were done.

The abomination that is the Registry blew that out of the water. Curiously, Linux is still based on ini files. I wonder why ?

In any case, I remember fondly those days where any problem with Windows could be resolved by exiting Windows, grabbing your trusty 5.25" floppy backup and overwriting the existing *.sys and *.ini files, and relaunching Windows.

Ever since Windows 95, resolving issues meant wiping the disk, reinstalling the OS, finding back all the required drivers and reconfiguring everything. A full day's work.

Windows 3 was a breeze to maintain.

Australia to track coronavirus encounters with payment card records

They're not going to be asking you anything. They're going to tell the banks to do the job and hand over the results.

30 percent of world agrees not to require onshore storage for e-commerce customer data

Re: So...

Yup, and I'm sure Google generously gave its lawyers to help in drafting this wonderful permission to track 30% of the world's population and send the harvest back to US soil.

International infosec rules delivered to make nations and non-state actors behave themselves online

Re: Possible but unlikely to be effective

And besides, take the USA, Russia and China.

I wouldn't trust any of those countries to sign up to this initiative and actually mean it.

[Checks meeting agenda...] Where does it say 'Talk cr*p and waste everyone's time'?

That is awesome. I wish I could do that too.

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

Re: How

The same way you turn on your flashlight : swipe down from the top to get the system apps. The mobile data icon (two vertical arrows in opposite directions) should not be far from the wifi icon.

Tap to turn it off.

Given that my mobile phone is a work phone, I go one step further : outside of work hours, I put it in airplane mode. That saves power.

Election security fears doused with reality: Top officials say Nov 3 'was the most secure in American history.' The end

Bullshit

You have just been told that the body that is specifically in charge of making sure the election was safe officially stated that it had been the safest election since forever.

Deal with it.

Bio-boffins devise potentially fast COVID-19 virus test kit out of a silicon wafer and machine-learning code

"Tiny holes 300nm across are drilled into the metal"

To me, that means that the system can only detect viruses that are a maximum of 300nm 299nm in size.

Can a virus get bigger than that ?

What happens if the virus is 302nm in size ?

BOFH: You might want to sit down for this. Oh, right, you can't. Listen carefully: THIS IS NOT AN IT PROBLEM!

a COVID expense

I'm guessing there is quite a lot of that doing the rounds.

Nokstalgia: HMD Global introduces yet another homage to the past – a 4G rework of the Nokia 6300

Cool

I'll be happy to have a phone like that when I retire.