* Posts by Pascal Monett

18221 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

House to grill CrowdStrike exec on epic IT meltdown... no, not the CEO

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Blame Microsoft, not Crowdstrike

And your opinion on AV software for Linux is that Linux is also perpetually insecure ?

I hate to defend Borkzilla on any point, but saying that it needs AV software because it is insecure seems a bit simplistic to me.

HPE to pursue $4B claim against estate of Mike Lynch over Autonomy acquisition

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

To its conclusion

God I hope that the conclusion will be that HPE can go fuck itself.

And attacking a widow just demonstrates the zombie state of the HPE board.

You've fucking lost. Admit it already.

Windows 11 continues slog up the Windows 10 mountain

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

"Windows 11 [..] has a way to go before finally surpassing its predecessor"

Funny, I seem to have heard the same song since XP got replaced by <shudder> Vista.

Hey Redmond : how's about you made an OS that actually pleased people for a change ?

You used to be able to do that . . .

Black horse down: Lloyds online banking services go dark

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"large swathes of Lloyds' IT is outsourced nowadays"

That makes it so much easier to know what changed and where . . .

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

"the more evolved Settings"

More evolved than what ? A flatworm ?

Thank you for demonstrating your buy-in to Borkzilla's agenda : continually deprecating anything that works to replace it with some beautiful UI bullshit that isn't clear and simple to use but looks better (aka : looks like the current fads wants it to).

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Missing detail

Interesting question.

Do you really think people paid attention to that in those days ?

Because I'm not sure they'd pay attention to it today . . .

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Indeed. Why don't we start by replacing the awful cargo ships that pollute as much as 100,000 cars ?

Because that would be penalising industry, and we can't have that, now can we ?

Faulty valve sent Astrobotic's Peregrine lander straight back to Earth's atmosphere

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

Oh, right then

"This would have invalidated costly, time-intensive spacecraft acceptance tests that had already been completed and could not be rescheduled without missing Peregrine's scheduled launch date"

So, thanks to you not taking the thing apart to find out what was going on, you now have invalidated the entire mission and trashed the spacecraft.

Well done !

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Whether we burn $500 million a year or $5 billion – or $50 billion a year – I don't care"

Of course you don't. You just want to sell you company for whatever and get your golden parachute without jumping out of the plane.

It's not like you're actually going to pay that anyway. That's someone else's problem.

France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: I think he's probably better than the last two, and possibly the last three

That is a typically French privilege : we can elect a different disaster every five years.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"French president Emannuel Macron used his X account"

Why the fuck does a President have an account on X ?

You're a fucking President, for fuck's sake, and you have a public office and an official Speaker.

Make a statement the official way. X is not a governmental organ.

(does it look like I can't stand Macron, or I can't stand X ? Debate. Hint : it's both)

Crypto boss finds fraud trial a serious pain in the neck

Pascal Monett Silver badge

No kidding

"a cryptocurrency investment platform that boasted high-yield investment products" lied the shit out of itself to scam the clueless.

FTFY.

P:S. : frankly, today, people who get scammed by that bullshit deserve to lose their money.

China is beating the world at scientific research, think tank finds

Pascal Monett Silver badge

the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

Is this actually a PR group for China ?

They can't stop talking about China. Don't they have anything else to think about ?

Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s welcome

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"unsure if Broadcom is a software company that will innovate, or a bunch of bankers.”

Oh, I know the answer to that : Broadcom is a bunch of bankers.

And they're banking wrong.

But it will take diminishing quarterly results for them to find it out . . .

SETI boldly looks beyond the Milky Way in latest alien hunt

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: A large portion of the captured energy would be re-released as waste heat

You don't know that. You have no idea what technology they have. Maybe they have perfected room-temperature superconductors. Maybe they have some other technique.

You are drawing conclusions based on our level of tech. That is a mistake.

Feds claim sinister sysadmin locked up thousands of Windows workstations, demanded ransom

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

"now faces up to 35 years behind bars"

I hope he gets the full charge, and I hope he doesn't get out for good behavior.

You are an Admin. You have the moral duty to ensure the proper functioning of your company's network and the duty to ensure that all employees can do their job.

If you betray that trust and stoop to actually demand ransom for the accomplishment of your duty, you deserve to be shot - so be happy with whatever sentence your jury will hand you.

Brain Cipher claims attack on Olympic venue, promises 300 GB data leak

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So, who still doesn't believe that crypto should be banned ?

DataVita declares sovereignty with 'National Cloud' for UK

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"an alternative to the big cloud operators"

Oh, so you've found a way to not bill for auto-configured auto-scalable instances that were not part of the initial contract ?

And how are you going to make money then ?

Because The CloudTM makes all its money on those companies that didn't plan their needs properly . . .

Brit teachers are getting AI sidekicks to help with marking and lesson plans

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"The UK government is set to equip teachers"

Oh, cool.

So UK Gov is going to fuck up education just like it fucked up health care.

Nice to know. A new trough for the corporate pigs. I wonder who got a new Mercedes out of this ?

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"The overwhelming majority of these were completed successfully"

The overwhelming majority.

So let's imagine 99%.

That leaves 1% of 9.6 million which, if my maths is right, means a whopping 9600 cases where things went wrong.

Now, I understand that, in this day and age . . . wait a minute, what the fuck am I saying ? You had computers convert something to something else and you couldn't be arsed to do that reliably across 100% of your customer history ?

WHAT THE FUCK ARE COMPUTERS FOR ?!?

If you need a proper programmer to do things right, call me . . .

Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Now just a cotton-picking minute, there

"relying on a decades-old decision to exclude 50,000 satellites from environmental review defies common sense"

I'm sure it made perfect sense for the lobbyists who made it happen. Not to mention the companies who paid the lobbyists.

EU tries to pin down China on definition of 'important data'

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"being happy to slurp up the data of other countries' people"

Oh, so just like the USA.

Nvidia's growth slows to a mere 122 percent but it’s still topping expectations

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

What ?

"most shipments associated with Singapore revenue were to locations other than Singapore and shipments to Singapore were insignificant"

Well then why post that revenue under Singapore ?

Is it because you were actually shipping to China when you're not supposed to ?

Google trains a GenAI model to simulate Doom's game engine in real-ish time

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Ok, but why Doom ?

Solitaire wasn't sexy enough ?

Elon Musk reins in Grok AI bot to stop election misinformation

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"largely touting its election tech as secure"

Um, I seem to remember quite a lot of discussions about how hacking one of those machines was easy-peasy.

That sounds like wishful thinking to me.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

If only.

Warren Buffett’s favorite insurer GEICO drops VMware for OpenStack

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Megaphone

Hey Broadcom !

Your cookie is starting to crumble.

You want big accounts and don't care about the small ones. Well Geico isn't a small account and you've lost it.

Your future is diminishing . . .

Proof-of-concept code released for zero-click critical IPv6 Windows hole

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

"bcdedit /set debug on"

Wait, am I supposed to help hackers by doing this ?

And if I don't, which will prevent from from reproducing the vuln, does that mean that a hacker wouldn't be able to either (meaning I'm actually secure) ?

I'm confused.

Microsoft hosts a security summit but no press, public allowed

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "Transparency"

Good point.

Public clouds are 'dirty' about VMware's on-prem push, says Broadcom CEO Hock Tan

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"all you guys are very important to the cause"

All us guys have been against using someone else's server since the beginning of this cloudy nonsense.

You're late to the party, but any help is welcome.

CrowdStrike's meltdown didn't dent its market dominance … yet

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"a costly and time consuming process"

Most probably, but that is not the important thing.

The important thing is : would it cost more to be once again shut down by CrowdStrike's carelessness ?

Boards all over are going to be looking carefully at that question, I'm sure.

Enterprise SAP users split between on-prem and cloud as migration challenges loom

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Private cloud [..] would not get the same innovations"

SAP : clouding itself into irrelevance.

Cloud is risk. And it's riskier than on-prem, given all the cloudy data hacks that have happened in the last year.

When you're on-prem, you may not know every little tidbit on how to defend your network, but apparently you're better off than depending on someone else's admin who may or may not answer your questions in the next 48 hours . . .

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I agree with what you say, but it is a fact that making a new model that totally ignored compatibility with the previous model was a big mistake that cost a lot of companies their existence.

Of course, we know that today, but what could Commodore have become if it had stayed compatible with previous versions ? Would Microsoft even exist ?

Rocket Factory Augsburg breaks down the SaxaVord blowout

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

"Enjoy the footage"

That's what I like about rocket science. The people involved are generally very mature and intelligent, and they can admit failure without blushing.

Not like most high levels in banks or other private corporations who seek to cover up their failures at all costs . . .

Facebook whistleblower calls for transparency in social media, AI

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: nobody ever dares interfere with big (domestic) websites

On that point, I really do think we should follow China's example and just throw Zuckerberg in jail for three months.

Methinks that might have a positive effect on the rest . . .

Big Tech: Malaysia won't let us set our own rules and that's not fair and makes us grumpy

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"placing undue burdens on businesses"

You mean, preventing the Board from getting ever bigger bonuses because - <gasp> - they'll actually have to spend some peanuts for the content monkeys ?

How unfair !

Woman uses AirTags to nab alleged parcel-pinching scum

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"police declined to pursue the matter"

How reassuring it must be to live in a country where the police can decide not to investigate a theft . . .

I wonder what their policy is on murder ? Never on a Monday ?

Chinese broadband satellites may be Beijing's flying spying censors, think tank warns

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

Oh look !

Another excuse to be afraid of China ! How wonderful !

I hadn't had a chance to terrorized by international news yet this week. Now that quota is filled.

Thank you so much, think tank !

The Windows Control Panel joins the ranks of the undead

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

Why migrate ?

Here's a novel idea, Redmond : why not put your commands in your shiny Settings turd, and leave the Control Panel alone ?

Silly me, Borkzilla is incapable of leaving well enough alone. If it works, it has to be tweaked until it doesn't anymore.

31.5M invoices, contracts, patient consent forms, and more exposed to the internet

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"exposed to the public internet in a non-password protected database"

In this day and age, I call that criminal negligence.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "usual black-and-white Gateway boxes"

Ah, power supplies.

Even today, when upgrading a PC I systematically search for a PSU that is at least 50% more powerful than the load I expect to have.

I have long since learned that, if a PSU is rated for 600W, it will give you 500W without too much trouble, in a pinch, for a while, but if you load it more, you will end up with a dead PSU sooner or later.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Yeah but no. There is a London, Texas, and you can bet that there is a number of US readers that just might be confused . . .

Lego's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

I'm happy you got through that trying episode.

And a Concorde is not a bad thing to remember it by . . .

Ex-Microsoft engineer resurrects PDP-11 from junkyard parts

Pascal Monett Silver badge

You might consider his ego a bit less inflated if you realized that he is just a person who has had an insane and insanely successful career.

And he's far from being an idiot.

Maybe that's what's grating you ? He's just good.

CockroachDB scurries off to proprietary software land

Pascal Monett Silver badge

CockroachDB

Yeah, it has cockroach in the name.

Should've guessed . . .

First of ESA's Cluster satellites prepares for fiery finale over South Pacific

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"after an extraordinarily long mission"

I beg to differ.

Space missions have one of two outcomes : either they fail spectacularly before getting into orbit (or reaching their destination), or they successfully get to where they were supposed to go and then they outperform all expectations until they a) run out of fuel, or b) run out of energy.

It's only on good ol' Earth that projects fail all the time and get endlessly rescued (eh, UK Government IT ?).

Why ?

Because on Earth, you can send a peon you pay peanuts to do a minor (or even a major) repair, and it costs less than a Learjet trip over the Atlantic. Or maybe a Learjet, who's counting ?

But, to repair things in space, it costs at least a 737 Max.

And that is why we'll never have space-rated technology on Earth.

It costs too damn much.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Simon is the personnification of the Single Electron Administrator theory.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

Pascal Monett Silver badge

And that is why Borkzilla definitely does not want anything to talk to Office300 if it can help it.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Electronics have certainly come a long way as far as durability under stress is concerned, but electromagnetism can still throw a monkey wrench into the workings from time to time. I wonder how a modern PC would resist in such conditions.

India delays planned space station and moon base by five years

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Delayed by five years, eh ?

What's to bet we'll be hearing that song again ?