Posts by Pascal Monett

What is it about McDonald's, cultural black holes, and not being able to make tech work?

Re: expand the pool of unemployed but above-average workers

So, I take it you're ready and willing to go work at Micky D ?

You might want to check out a better bar.

Institute of Directors survey says most bosses expect no mass return to the office if COVID-19 crisis ever ends

"directors must make sure they are going out of their way to support employees' mental wellbeing"

Tell that to IBM.

Fujitsu gets ready to eat its own dogfood as company-wide digital transformation project kicks off

Look at the bright side

At least Capita is not in charge, so Fujitsu just might have a chance.

Microsoft says bug, sorry, 'a latent defect' in Safe Deployment Process system downed Azure Active Directory

Microsoft and its rings

Everything has rings at Borkzilla. They have been well thought-out and cleverly implemented, with iron-clad protocols and processes to respect, and yet they regularly blow up and spew stuff over every ring at the same time.

Windows Update had the same problem no too long ago, remember ? It was the Fast Ring update that spewed over every other ring and borked a whole slew of PCs.

It's a very good idea, really. Except it's Borkzilla, so Murphy's Law stands proud.

Icon for the ring, obviously.

First analysts, now YouTubers put you on blast. Do you A) take it on the chin or B) up fire up the DMCA-o-tron?

Sounds so fair, doesn't it ?

"Users must fill out a copyright removal request form, and when doing so we remind them to consider exceptions to copyright law. Anyone who believes their reuse of a video or segment is protected by fair use can file a counter-notice.”

Oh, you remind them to consider exceptions to copyright law, but then you go and file a strike against the YouTuber anyway. So, in practice, you do bugger all to keep things fair because even if the YouTuber disputes the strike, that won't keep you from piling them on and, after three, he's down for the count.

Stop trying to make it look like you're being fair, YouTube, because you are clearly not.

Fair would be a DCMA claim is made, the target is notified, the target then chooses to file a counter claim or not. If not, then the strike is counted. If a counter-claim is filed, then YouTube (not a judge) analyzes the video and determines whether the copyright holder is justified in his claim. YouTube then notifies both parties of its decision, and if there still remains a dispute, everybody goes to court.

THAT would be fair.

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

Not a true Who Me

He just reported the problem. He's not the one who bungled the fix.

Unis turn to webcam-watching AI to invigilate students taking exams. Of course, it struggles with people of color

"racist technology"

It's not the tech that is racist, it's the idiots who built it who utterly failed to take into account that white people aren't the only people on the planet.

Given how long it's been since we've been reading about these issues, I find it utterly incomprehensible that the problem still exists. Hello ? Train your damn "AI" with pictures of brown people. Can't be that hard, now can it ?

Adventures in SQL Server 2019: Microsoft updates the update that broke the update

"We recommend that you test [..] before deploying to production environments."

Don't worry, Borkzilla. Anyone with a modicum of experience in your updates knows that you have to wait for the reports from the first raft of users live beta testers to give it a whirl before deciding to implement an update.

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

Middle English ?

Soudure is French. And when did they do soldering in the Middle Ages ?

Talk about working smarter: NASA scientists searching for craters on Mars train AI software to do the job for them

You certainly have a point, I do not deny that, but I feel the frustration of the OP.

I am also continuously frustrated with the unending abuse of a term that was created to mean something specific - a mind living in silicon - and not a mere statistical analysis machine.

I'm glad we have something to do a tedious job more quickly, that's great for Science, I suppose, but it is not AI and it never will be.

GitHub users speak their brains on Microsoft's open-source efforts: ASP.NET shines, but WPF is 'a disaster'

"internally the WPF team was not sufficiently staffed"

Right, that means that there is one guy swamped in work, but he was only given a laptop, he has no server to test on and his office is on the other side of the building from the toilets and the coffee machine.

On top of that, there are daily 90-minute meetings to discuss progress.

Yup, things are going swimmingly.

Microsoft Exchange 2010 support ends in a matter of days and there are 139,000 internet-facing servers still up

Vnext - and so it starts

Borkzilla is finally gearing up to get everyone on board with a subscription. And with the perfect excuse : no more out-of-date mail servers !

Ain't life grand ? There are going to be some fat bonuses when Vnext comes out, and it'll be every year, too.

I am starting to think about getting some Borkzilla shares. It looks like they won't be going down any time soon.

Russia and China's 'digital authoritarianism' means we need to better arm our cyber troops, warns top UK general

"If the United States truly wants to get serious about restricting the global spread of authoritarian technology ..."

I'm sorry, where on Earth did you get that idea ?

In case you haven't noticed, the USA is getting more authoritarian by the day. The only thing the US Government wants to restrict is people's privacy, and also it wants to be the only country to invade that.

US govt wins right to snaffle Edward Snowden's $5m+ book royalties, speech fees – and all future related earnings

"deciding Snowden broke his non-disclosure agreements"

Well duh, that's pretty much the definition of whistleblower right there.

The fact that the US government is incapable of granting Snowden his whistleblower rights by law is a strong indication of just how little the NSA or the CIA care about law.

And after that you expect the NSA to stop its surveillance just because some judge decided it was illegal ?

Pah.

Microsoft lends Windows on Arm a hand with emulation layer to finally run 64-bit x86 apps at last

Re: Linux is a joke

Linux is what makes the Internet work.

Linux is what makes Azure work.

I'm pretty sure AWS is not using Windows to work.

For fuck's sake, even Microsoft is not using Windows to run Azure. Hello ?

Hint : a successful troll is posting something that is at least remotely plausible.

Ocado shakes hands with Oracle on cloud ERP system to help it ply online grocer tech in overseas markets

"a scalable and flexible business platform"

From what I've read, the only thing that is scalable and flexible is Oracle's licensing terms.

But they'll find that out the hard way, I guess.

O2 cuts ribbon on UK's first commercial driverless car lab where it'll blend satellite and 5G signal to stay on the road

"You can't run everything in the cloud."

Amen to that.

Given that a car is typically a hulking beast of metal and plastic that has no problem killing pedestrians or cyclists at a speed of several meters per second, I would expect a driverless car to be able to react to an obstacle in less than a millisecond and not depend on sending a data packet to some remote server somewhere and wait for the latency, the processing time and the latency of the response before getting the message "BREAAAAAKKK !".

Driverless has to mean better-than-human-reflexes. Having a central computer and depending on network coverage pretty much scuppers that from the start in my opinion.

Key-cutting machine borked sideways after visit from the BSOD fairy locks things down

Bedrock

If you really wanted bedrock, you should have spent your two years of design making it work on Linux.

Mine's the one with an actual stable OS in the pocket.

UK privacy watchdog confirms probe into NHS England COVID-19 app after complaints of spammy emails, texts

Yes, I set my "do not disturb" at 19h every evening : I put my phone in flight mode.

When I wake up, after washing up, getting dressed and getting my brain in gear, I then open that damn thing to world again by removing flight mode.

Works perfectly.

Where are we now? Microsoft 363? 362? We've lost count because Exchange Online isn't playing nicely this morning

"recent configuration update"

Typical Borkzilla. Everything is working, so let's go change something and see what happens.

Haven't you heard of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" ?

Of course not, silly me.

Burning down the house! Consumer champ Which? probes smart plugs to find a bunch of insecure fire-risk tat

And we all know the importance of the scootch.

All hail the scootch !

They sell it, of course. Why do think they put the thing on the market ? For their customers ?

Russian hacker, described as 'brilliant' by judge, gets seven years in a US clink for raiding LinkedIn, Dropbox

Re: Sympathy...

Indeed.

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

Hydrogen-powered train tested on Britain's railway tracks as diesel alternative

So the UK has a working fusion reactor ?

That's news. Because of course, once you have fusion, spending the near limitless energy on creating hydrogen is a no-brainer.

But without fusion, your hydrogen is mainly created by coal plants, so you gain nothing.

Really people, get going on Thorium.

It's our only hope until fusion gets real.

Brit tax collector HMRC wants fireside chat with suppliers to discuss ways to spend the annual £900m IT budget

It's nice to have ambition

Ambition is a good thing.

Start by having the ambition to succeed in your IT projects. You'll tackle being best in the world later.

Trello co-founder Michael Pryor on pandering to power users, skyrocketing numbers, and the spectre of Microsoft

It's called feature bloat

"Developers," he said, "add more stuff, add more stuff, add more stuff..."

Indeed. Borkzilla has been doing that since the dawn of computing. Remember when they wanted to make RSS more rich-texty ? RSS works fine as it is, leave it alone.

Really, sometimes I think there's a PHB who just wants to be able to say that he headed a project.

A good program is a program that does what the user actually needs. When you get to that point, take a step back and beware any modifications. Bells and whistles may be nice to have, but if they impede the primary function, they are an impediment and should be dropped.

NHS England awards £1.6m deal to build digital staff 'passports' in fight against coronavirus second wave

"In view of the extreme urgency"

The NHS might have done good to pay attention to the issue in March of this year.

Because the problem was pretty much obvious back then.

It's 2020 so not only is your mouse config tool a Node.JS Electron app, it's also pwnable by an evil webpage

I totally agree with you. What is this madness ? You need a webserver to manage your mouse configs ?

Is this another case of a job being given to the summer intern who just finished a web development course ?

Get your ducks in a row and make a proper DLL in C++ to do job.

Oh, right, that means you're actually going to have to learn a proper programming language. Sorry.

With so many cloud services dependent on it, Azure Active Directory has become a single point of failure for Microsoft

"we will never be able to avoid outages entirely"

No, you won't. Because I understand that cloud is complicated. The amount of data, the bandwidth requirements, along with the security requirements, I genuinely believe that the people who have imagined, planned, specced and built this are largely above-average in intelligence and competence.

But, as I have said before and will not stop saying, when a company's local server falls, it only bothers the company and its customers. When The Cloud (TM) falls over, it impacts millions of people and businesses.

It's okay though. We're still learning this computing thing. One day, we'll get the message : never build a single point of failure into your IT infrastructure.

I don't know how that will pan out, but that's what we've got to do.

Arm hasn't given up on self-driving car brains – its new Cortex-A78AE is going into Nvidia's Orin chip, for a start

5nm

Gosh.

To think that my first 8086 was 3000nm.

40 years later and our engraving process has shrunk CPUs by a factor of 600.

Yikes.

EU's decision on UK data adequacy set to become 'political football' in broader Brexit negotiations

"Dominic Cummings [..] sees GDPR as a hindrance"

So does the NSA and every Nazi-cum-dictator who wants to know everything on everyone in order to be able to blackmail (or black bag ?) more effectively.

The EU : fast becoming the last bastion of Freedom, Privacy and Justice for All.

Good news: Euro sat spots liquid pools on Mars. Bad news: Under ice, saltier than someone who put last penny into a failed crypto biz

On the contrary, there are many gas giants that have been found close to their star and tidally locked.

It's a wonder why our own Jupiter didn't end up there as well - except we have Saturn.

This astrophysicist thinks that is the reason.

TikTok wins reprieve as judge rules it can stay in American iOS, Android app stores for now

Re: Elections

Absolutely.

A very mature move. For a toddler, that is.

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

Proton

The one thing I will take from this article is the existence of something that allows Steam Windows games to run on Linux.

A ray of sunshine at last.

Now I can go peacefully toward retirement, knowing that, when I get there, I will be able to game to my hearts' content without the clunker that is Windows to hold me back any more.

Happy days.

Re: Running games is the simple part

Yeah, right.

Games today and historically have always been the activity that taxes the hardware to the max. CPU, GPU and RAM are left choking and sometimes even the disk gets its share (e.g. badly programmed loading screens).

I cannot count the times I have upgraded my PC to the latest and greatest in CPU and video, only to buy a new game and find myself playing at a measly 45fps.

I think that the only other widespread personal activity that can bring a PC to its knees is video editing. I hardly do any of that, but when I do indulge, well, let me just say that I put my gaming on hold until it's done.

Excel doesn't hold a candle to that kind of activity.

Inflated figures and customers who were never there. Just another data migration then

Re: "fastest growing"

By definition that means that you have the smallest market share, or you're in a new market that you just created. It's easy to grow fast when you have everything to conquer.

That's how I always take it.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Crypto exchange cracked, Bitcoin burgled

"new payment players [..] not allowed anywhere near its innermost workings"

That is a wise decision. Crypto exchanges are not banks and are not run by banking professionals. Anyone can set one up and, by the rich history of exchanges having been hacked, anybody does.

Even if I did want to give funny money a try, I would be at a loss to choose someone who is worth trusting because there aren't any. It would be like walking into a den of thieves and handing my money over to the guy who did not have an eye patch yet.

Re: banks are robbed on an almost daily basis

Citation please ?

When is the last time somebody digitally broke into a client account and siphoned off the money ?

That doesn't happen, pure and simple.

Oh, ATM's can get pilfered, for sure. And there's that one transfer that got cracked, indeed. But that was not access to client accounts, that was the hijacking of money in movement between banks and it happened because it was an inside job and the security was lacking.

I have never read that a true bank's customer's account got hacked, and I doubt very much that I ever will.

IT guy whose job was to stop ex-staff running amok on the network is jailed for running amok on the network

"is unlikely to be hired again as an IT worker"

Are you kidding me ? He is unlikely to ever be put in a position where he has access to a computer again. And that serves him right.

An IT specialist has a duty of behavior. When we are given access rights, it is to help people do their jobs, not take personal benefit from it and certainly not to wreck company data.

A year and a day makes his sentence a felony crime, and that will go down on his record. Good.

He can spend the rest of his life flipping burgers.

Error-bnb: Techies scramble to fix Airbnb website bug that let strangers read each others' account messages

Re: Ahh! The classic cookie clearing fix to the rescue...

Indeed. If I had heard that I would have replied that if my cookies allowed me to see other people's data, then the problem is a lot bigger than I would have thought.

"Hello, bank ? I have access to your CEO's account."

"Clear your cookies and call back."

"Really ? Well don't mind if I make a transfer first."

Ridiculous.

Alphabet promises to no longer bung tens of millions of dollars to alleged sex pest execs who quit mid-probe

Indeed. Not only is this perfectly consensual, but the guy had shares. That is his property and he can do whatever he wants with them.

The first affair is the issue, and what I would like is an explanation on how Google waited until now to decide to not pay tens of millions to top execs under suspicion of sexual misconduct. I'm sorry, I'm just a lowly programmer, but if are suspected of sexual harassment or misconduct and there is an inquiry ongoing, if you decide to bail and I'm the CEO, you're on your own and I won't give you a single cent.

Bailing out like that is a clear sign of guilt. There is no reason to shower a guilty person with money.

Facebook is the internet's cigarette: Addictive and laced with nasty stuff – 'shocking images, graphic videos, headlines that incite outrage'

Re: Zukerberg has made enough

A billionaire who decides stop making money ?

Fat chance.

EDIT : by pure coincidence, I just found this.

'Robbery, economic plunder, victim of larcenous cronyism and a heist'

Agreed, except that that is an act that should have been executed when China banned Facebook, not years later by a blabbering idiot who can't get his stories straight from one hour to the next.

HubSpot must prove core sales features to be taken seriously in enterprise CRM market

"its new CRM is flexible enough to fit customer processes"

To me, that sounds like it is a nightmare to configure, with an abundance of settings that have obscure names and incomprehensible consequences.

SAP is flexible too, you just need to pay a team of experts for ten years to (maybe) get it running like you need.

Key API management platform for UK public sector scrapped: DWP ends £5m MuleSoft project

"an IT strategy centred around shared services and asset reuse"

So basically there is going to be a lot of csv files being exported and imported, while all the crap that has accumulated from wrong decisions and lazy planning will keep churning.

Sounds like a plan.

England's COVID-tracking app finally goes live after 6 months of work – including backpedal on how to handle data

I live in France as well. As a general rule, since the beginning of all the hoopla I have found my compatriots to generally be of the obedient persuasion. When walking outside there are people who wear masks in the local cities. In my village, that is not the case, but social distancing is observed. People walking their dogs cross each other on the opposite side of the road. If they are acquainted, they stop and chat, but the road is between them.

In shops, everyone wears the mask.

This is a far cry from the reputation of the average Frenchman, who scorns authority and rebukes government directives. It is the Esprit Gaulois and we persuade ourselves that we are all little Asterix and the government and police are the Romans. We are convinced that any invader would leave after a while because "we are ungovernable".

Well I don't see any of that spirit in the streets these days. That said, I live in Moselle, a stone's throw from the German border. Maybe there's a bit of German discipline overflowing the border bit by bit, like an invisible fog.

Uncle Sam's legal eagles finally make up their mind on internet giants' Get Out Of Jail Free card – and it's not as bad as you may fear

Now that is a link to keep handy.

Microsoft leaks 6.5TB in Bing search data via unsecured Elastic server. *Insert 'Wow... that much?' joke here*

"The data was, apparently, not encrypted"

That is just about as damning a sentence as one can write in this kind of case. In what world does a major multinational behemoth create a database of user-identifiable data and not encrypt it ?

There should be a law on that.

That, and the fact that the authentication was removed (why ??) means that I am quite happy to have never used Bing and won't be using it any time soon.

At least not until my aneurysm. After that, no guarantees.

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

Oh. My. God.

I've just read through the first 86 pages of this report and the one adjective that comes to mind is : damning.

Boeing is 100% guilty of taking an airframe and putting engines on it that didn't fit, then designing faulty software around that for the sole purpose of having a plane that could respond to the latest Airbus threat.

Security was never part of the equation. Speed of production and profitability were the only criteria. To the extent that engineering personnel bringing attention to possible issues were literally ignored or silenced.

That smacks of manslaughter to me.

The FAA is guilty of having a buddy relationship with Boeing that extends to Boeing representatives paid by Boeing working at the FAA and pushing the Boeing point of view on the regulator instead of being mediators between the two. Who is the fucking idiot that thought that was a good idea ?

If I disregard the appalling cost in human lives that this entire marketing project has created, the entire report reads like a particularly macabre episode of Yes Minister, where Sir Humphry would be a perfect fit in orchestrating self-certification and FAA approval while quashing the irritating reality of issues.

Shame. Shame.

Shame all around.