Posts by Pascal Monett

In the E in HPE stands for Eroding revenues... Intel chip shortage, hardware supplies, coronavirus punish IT titan

"Coronavirus has [..] injected a new degree of uncertainty"

I'm guessing it's not the last time we'll be hearing words like that. Containment has failed, so the impact of this thing can only get worse.

IBM exec told that High Court evidence in Co-Op Insurance case wasn't 'truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth'

"I did not have clarity from my own team"

So, you were parachuted into an existing situation and you could not manage, despite your impressive title, to get a complete picture of the siuation.

You then proceeded to restrict the picture to what you understood, and then complained when the customer, incredibly, stubbornly stayed with the fantastical idea of having a working product.

Well, Mr. Perrott, I'm glad I'll never have to do business with you.

Mine's the one with the complete specifications in the pocket.

UK.gov lays out COVID-19 guidance as the tech supply chain considers its own

"Boris Johnson's 'action plan' has four strands"

No, it has five, but I'm not expecting him to know how to count.

Treatment is not mitigation. Mitigation is what you do when don't have a treatment - which is, if I'm not mistaken, the case now.

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

"they were entering into one-and-a-half month's of pre-redundancy consultation"

And at that point the whole team should just up and WALK. In an ideal world, that's what the response would be. You want to get rid of us after what we did to save the entire company ? Fine, we're gone. Now you can go and fill in the slots, the offices will be empty and nobody will be around for the oh-so-vaunted "knowledge transfer".

But obviously, that won't happen. These people need those jobs, and they need time to find another one. I'm willing to bet that they won't be busting their ass off any more though. Printer won't print ? We'll deal with that next month.

Honeywell, I blew up the qubits: Thermostat maker to offer cloud access to 'world's most powerful quantum computer' within months

"This is not a science project"

Yes it is. Businesses see no clear problem-solving solution, and they have already invested billions in code and hardware that does solve their problems.

The day quantum computing can solve the traveling salesman problem for actual marketing problems, then it will be invested in. But right now, I don't think that companies have a clue what to with quantum computing. Just like nobody knows what to do with the much-vaunted blockchain apart from pretending that it makes your transactions with funny money anonymous and secure.

Boeing didn't run end-to-end test on Calamity Capsule, DSCOVR up and running, and NASA buys a Falcon Heavy

"A few more minutes of testing"

Well, at least there had been some testing, eh, Microsoft ?

How's this for a remote support fix? Solar storm early-warning satellite repaired with million-mile software update

The Deep Space Climate Observatory

And they choose DSCOVR as acronym ? Why didn't they go for DSCO ?

And put a mirror ball on top ?

Wasted opportunity.

<grumble> <grumble> kids these days <grumble>

HP hostile takeover warms up: Xerox queues print job cash_and_shares.pdf, mails it to the board to mull over

Re: Why do I get the feeling

Well, Xerox can always write off however many billion, then attack HP management for cooking the books, right ?

I mean, look how much good that has done for HP against Autonomy ?

Oh, right . . .

Apple checks under the couch for $500m in spare change, offers it to make power-throttling gripes disappear

"Apple – which banked $55bn profit in its 2019 fiscal year – is willing to pay up to $500m"

Don't you just love a country where it's the companies that decide how much they're going to pay ?

Drones must be constantly connected to the internet to give Feds real-time location data – new US govt proposal

"given extortionate US mobile rates"

Well that's what it is when you're a third-world Internet country. Instead of crying over how much the mobile rates cost you, get some balls and force the providers to provide you with rates that are cheaper.

I mean, isn't the USA the "land of the brave" ? The EU has done away with roaming charges. Can't you do any better ?

First MWC, then GDC, now Nvidia's GPU conference is online-only as coronavirus spreads in Silicon Valley

"But we’ll do this all online"

Here's an idea :

Instead of wasting airline fuel to bring thousands of people to ogle petty ladies and half-heartily listen to your marketing spiel while searching for every bit of swag they can possible take back home, why not keep it that way ? It's not not like the people you invite have any bandwidth issues, now is it ?

Online presentations. Economical, green, no women to degrade and on-message, all the time.

How's that for starting the 3rd Millennium ?

Oh, it's not a revenue stream ? Oh well, back to the usual then. Ladies ? On with the skimpy outfits.

If it's Goodenough for me, it's Goodenough for you: Canuck utility biz goes all in on solid-state glass battery boffinry

Automatically ?

Do you by any chance believe that batteries are filled up during the night by house elves ?

"Critics have been understandably sceptical"

Those critics are Nobel Prize winners ? I don't think so. So, when you're skeptical of a Nobel Prize winner's declarations, you first test that he's wrong before spouting nonsense.

On top of that, these critics are up against Dr Goodenough, which already has a history of demonstrating that critics are wrong.

I know this is Science, and Science requires critical thinking as well as skepticism, but honestly, from what I've read about the guy whose name has nothing to do with his competence, when he says something, you would do better to just shut up and listen.

Goodenough. It boggles the mind to realize that the man who has brought us the technology that kids' hands are grafted to, that allows literally billions of people to communicate with each other almost instantly, that man's name is Goodenough.

I realize that Oneoftheverybest was probably not an option.

Retailers, banks, unis and high schools used controversial law enforcement facial-recog software – and more

"We are [..] working on complying with their terms and conditions"

Well it's about damn time you did. It seems pretty clear that you abused just about everything you could. That kind of behavior should be slapped with a personal fine for the CEO coupled with the interdiction of ever managing anything more important than a porta-potty for the rest of his effin' life.

Is it just me, or are the scum just crawling out the woodwork now ?

Surprise! Plans for a Brexit version of the EU's Galileo have been delayed

Re: Good

Not only is it not really necessary to the UK, the UK most certainly doesn't have the resources to go it alone. Does the UK really believe it has USA-level budgets to play around with ? If that were the case, it would never have needed to enter the EU in the first place.

Whether or not the EU needs it is up for debate, but one thing is certain : such a project needs EU-levels of resources. There is not one single country in the EU - or out of it - that could try this alone.

The USA is the only country in the world that had the means and the reason to get this done. China might be able to do so now, and everything in its economic perspectives mean that it certainly will have the means in the future.

But the UK ? All by itself ? Don't think so.

Microsoft's Cortana turns its back on consumers as skills are stripped from Windows 10

Re: Productivity

Productivity would probably also be increased if you could get a window with the proper configuration settings that you needed without searching for it for ten minutes. Not to mention that, if the next update didn't go around changing my settings, I would really be more productive.

Oh, and finally, it would really enhance productivity if Office products actually respected the language settings they are set to.

Just recently I was giving a training course in Powerpoint and, on a laptop that was in English in Windows, on Powerpoint Options that clearly indicated that the interface language to use was the default OS language, the damn thing showed the Ribbon in French. Impossible to get it to actually obey its settings.

Hello ? Microsoft ? Is anybody home ?

I guess not. Too busy shouting at their OS to actually work.

It's only a game: Lara Croft won't save enterprise tech – but Jet Set Willy could

"anything you can do in software you can do in hardware"

I'd like to see the size of the chip that could do Windows in hardware.

On another matter, "GPUs grew out of gaming". Globally I have to admit that that is likely true, but the very first graphic card I bought was an Orchid Farenheit 1280 in 1992. It had an entire MB of RAM !

I bought it because it promised accelerated performance for Windows 3.11. For Windows !

Of course, the next graphics card upgrade I purchased was a Diamond Stealth in 1995 (not entirely sure it's that exact version). That was not for accelerating Windows, I'll admit, although by that time, accelerating Windows was, apparently, par for the course.

It's not until 1997 that my hunt for performance started, badly, with the Matrox Mystique. Needless to say, I went Voodoo 2 in the year that followed, and then it was Nvidia that reigned supreme in my PCs.

But I'll never forget that Orchid card.

Hey, fatso. If you're standing desk-curious, the VariDesk Pro Plus won't break the bank

That setup doesn't work for me

Having the screens that high up compared to the keyboard would never work for me. I need reading glasses now, and the part that works best is the lower half. That means that the screens I work on have to be as low as possible on the desk.

I have the intention of asking that my doctor no longer do progressive on the prescription the next time I have to change, but even so, I can't work tilting my head back. Besides, it's not good for your posture, or your neck.

We regret to inform you there are severe delays on the token ring due to IT nerds blasting each other to bloody chunks

I feel your pain. To think that there is now two generations that have never even seen Doom, let alone played it.

Where's my cane ?

Re: Multi-monitor Doom

I am soo jealous.

Captcha

I don't understand what happened. For the first time ever, when I went to submit my post, I got a Captcha request. The post was not submitted until I validated it.

I came to El Reg as I usually do, with Firefox using NoScript and Ublock Origin. No, I'm not on a VPN, nor do I use Tor.

Edit : it didn't happen for this post. I'm guessing it won't happen again today. Weird.

We were doing that at the lab at uni

The university had, of course, Ethernet, although I have no idea of what the bandwidth was at that time. We'd look up when the lab was unoccupied, sneak in at that time and then use our specially-crafted boot floppies to hook onto the network and blast away. I remember looking at the boot.ini file and there was, to me at the time, arcane instructions with parameters that meant nothing to me.

Good times.

Edit : what's with the Captcha nonsense now ? I'm already logged in !

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

Ah. Well obviously then. What a shame.

"you can no longer laugh at Dance of the Vampires" ?

What ? Why ? It's a great comedy ! If you don't laugh, what on Earth are you going to do ?

Take it Huawei, Pai: Senate passes bill to rip 'dodgy' kit from rural telcos

Managed by the FCC

Congratulations, Pai, you've managed to find another way to help your friends in the telecoms industry. Why should the government subsidize replacing equipment ? Because everyone agrees with government intervention when the government pays for it. But when the government wants medicare for all and reaches into the pockets of the rich and influential, then its "governmental meddling" and anti-American and all that bullshit.

Oh well, I'm sure that you'll manage that money very efficiently to help your poor, poor telecom friends.

Vivo's APEX 2020 concept smartphone grabs life by the gimbals to shoot stable snaps

You're talking about camera makers. Vivo makes phones. Even if phones can take pictures, they are not cameras. I prefer pics taken with my Canon EOS 400D over the ones taken with my Samsung A3 any day.

Escape From Tarkov: Hardest of the hardcore looter-shooter is spellbinding despite the punishing learning curve

Thanks, I'll stay on 7 Days To Die

That is a fun game, constantly improving, and I can have a server set to my preferences where only me and my friends can play.

I've played Battlefield 2 long enough to know that your worst enemy is the arsehole on your side that shoots you because you got to the plane first. Thank you very much, but I do not have the time or the patience to waste on playing with arseholes I don't know.

The goal is to enjoy myself ? That's why I only play with people I've met face-to-face.

Southern Water not such a phisherman's phriend, hauls itself offline to tackle email lure

I note one thing

The attack was contained, did not do any damage, and the company did not trot out the red flag that is "security is our top priority" - because they didn't need to.

Windows 10 Slow Ring update strides confidently into 2020

"the Surf game its engineers had built into the new browser"

Yes, because it is so important that a browser has a built-in game.

Look, it was funny back in 1996, but nowadays you can just make it an add-on. All browsers have add-ons. This programmer thing about building games into applications that are not games needs to stop.

Besides, Microsoft, you have more important things to do then patch a browser game, and since it is built-in, you know as well as I do that you'll have to patch it one day.

Besides, you're not proving anything any more. When Excel 97 was revealed to have a flight sim hidden in it, it was impressive because file sizes were a thing in those days, and memory was scarce. Today you're playing with gigabytes on disk and in memory, so you're not showing off your programming chops anymore, you're just demonstrating that you can waste your time.

Quantum compute boffins called up to get national UK centre organised for some NISQy business

"The UK has long been a world leader in quantum computing science"

I'm glad to hear you say that, but what metric are you using to justify it ?

As far as I know, everybody has been working on quantum computing and the UK is not the one where the big breakthroughs are being made. Google declared one, Princeton University declared another. Where's the UK great achievement that makes it a world leader ?

Death and taxis: Windows has had enough of clinging to a cab rooftop in the London rain

Re: The real big joke

Shhh ! Don't say that aloud. They might learn about it and we'll have to start paying for everything.

F8 accompli: Facebook, Epic Games, Microsoft, Unity abandon conference plans over coronavirus fears

I would agree with you if there was proof that that is how the virus appeared, but we have no proof on that, just a supposition.

Now, personally, I think that placing wild animals in a food market is quite unsanitary, but that has nothing to do with the kinds of animals they eat. It's just gross in itself.

Trashing privacy? That's our job! Facebook accuses analytics biz of harvesting people's info from software dev kit sold to app makers

I just checked out the homepage of that site. When I read the words "It allows people to look at the same data with different apps at the same time", it doesn't make me feel that this is going to anything else than exacerbate the problem.

I heard somebody say: Burn baby, burn – server inferno!

But of course

Oh dear, I got some water on my laptop. Should I bring it home and use a hairdryer to try and fix the problem ? Nah, I'll just use the company server room equipment, which I will reconfigure to my needs. Oh, there's a reason why the aircon is set to cold ? Doesn't matter, I need warm. There, my problem is solved. I shall now leave everything the way it is without a care in the world. If anything bad happens, it's not my budget.

Man, I would have so fired that guy.

Nokia said to be considering sale or merger as profits tank

"intense pressures on profitability"

Ah, corporatespeak. Sounds better than saying "can't make enough money", doesn't it ?

Northrop Grumman's space zombie slayer grants Intelsat 901 five more years in orbit

"heads off to assist other client spacecraft"

Because after five years it's going to have the fuel to do that ?

I thought they made one MEV per satellite to service.

Pope tells his followers to log off for Lent

Not yet, but in time . . .

If you're serious about browser privacy, you should probably pass on Edge or Yandex, claims Dublin professor

You can configure that in Options under Search.

Poor old Google. Its cloud division only brought in $8.9bn last year. So it's chucking a few billion at US offices and data centres

Never forget

"improve how we market, partner and engage with customers"

Google's customers are ad slingers, not you and me. So all data center plans are about increasing the amount of storage Google has to keep on reaping our personal info and sell that to its customers.

Hacker swipes customer list from controversial face-recog-for-Feds Clearview. Its reaction? 'A part of life'

“Security is Clearview’s top priority"

Sound the bugle, we have another hypocrite !

As soon as I hear that sentence, I know you didn't give a flying one about security. It's a badge, you see. It's like a criminal saying "But I didn't do nuthin' !" while getting caught with the goods.

Getting hacked is a way of life ? Well sure, when you can't be arsed to set up the proper fences.

Salesforce's revolving door spins amid shopping spree: Co-CEO out, BT alumnus G-Patz up, Vlocity slurped

The executive merry-go-round continues

This is our version of People, or Vanity Fair. We follow the hallowed lives of individuals that "manage thousands of employees" and have experience with the upper management of billion-dollar companies, knowing that we will never attain those lofty heights.

But that club has the same admission rules as the Jet Set : you just need to know the right people (which I don't, obviously). Given the abject failures of some of them (eh, TSB ?), it's obviously not a question of competence.

Game over, man: Microsoft test engineer who laundered stolen Xbox credits into $10m guilty of fraud

"he didn't intend to defraud Microsoft"

No, of course not. He bought a $1.6m house under constraint.

This guy is proof is that you don't have to be a genius to rip people off. It's also proof that you'd better be smart enough to avoid associating your own name in any way with funds that been obtained illegally.

He should have paid more attention to money laundering processes. But that takes time, and the money was right there.

And now he's going down for twenty. Serves him right for spouting such nonsense. "Oh, Your Honor, I didn't do it on purpose. For months. By exploiting test code I had access to."

Moron.

Admins beware! Microsoft gives heads-up for 'disruptive' changes to authentication in Office 365 email service

I do. All the time.

I am not leaving my mail on somebody else's server. My mail is mine, and goes to my local storage.

I love POP. I'll never stop using it.

But then, I'm the kind who keeps mainly to himself and doesn't spaff his private life all over the web for all to see without a thought.

Google begs for US Entity List exemption to let Huawei use its mobile services – report

It's only a question of time anyway

Thanks to Trump, now China is on the verge of declaring its economic independence. It has access to all the blueprints, it has PhDs formed in the best Western universities, it has the economic need to grow, and now it is banned from growing in the West.

Well it'll grow in the East, and make products that Think Different, and expand the competition like Apple and Google have never seen before.

Hey, it's Capitalism, so the US should be overjoyed.

Famed Apple analyst chances his Arm-based Macs that Apple kit will land next year

5nm ? Where did that come from ?

Last I'd heard, Intel badly fumbled 10nm (giving AMD a royal red carpet), and was trying to get 7nm going because 10nm was royally FUBAR'd.

And now Apple suddenly has 5nm on the roadmap?

Apple ?

Is there some alien tech I've not heard of yet ?

Someone please explain. I'm in the dark here.

Hey, £18bn-revenue defence megacorps screw up ERP overhauls too: BAE took a £36m hit for delayed rollout

"replace seven legacy ERP systems with one"

Holy effin' cow pats. It's already almost impossible to replace one legacy ERP system with a new one and guarantee operational continuity, how the hell did some genius think that they could go do that with seven ?

I'm pretty sure a rocket scientist couldn't solve that equation.

The Ghost of Windows 10 Past shrinks back as Microsoft's axeman tiptoes ever closer

Re: just Windows borking itself

Yeah, but ; it's a feature !

Departing MI5 chief: Break chat app crypto for us, kthxbai

Backdoor only for authorities

Okay, fine. I'll accept that if you accept that the front door to your house and to the houses of all top-level government officials, including the Queen, can be opened by a special button "only known to the authorities". That button also disables all alarms.

Deal ?

No ?

What a surprise.

Microsoft uses its expertise in malware to help with fileless attack detection on Linux

No. Linux is open source, yes, but there is no obligation to open source applications on Linux.

If Adobe has a Linux version of PhotoShop, you can bet your last dollar that the code is not open source. Adobe can, however, sell a Linux version of its product. The fact that the OS is open source has nothing to do with that.

Identically, Windows is not open source, but there is nothing to prevent you from creating open source software on Windows.

While hype merchants push chatbots, CIOs are saving up pennies while expecting a recession, reckons study

So, around half or even three quarters of dis-satisfaction

I have the notion that satisfaction would be greater if IT wasn't saddled with implementing the latest new shiny simply because the CEO's nephew likes it and wants the bragging rights.

Last year one of my important customers abandoned a Helpdesk application that was providing reliable numbers and complete reports on the Helpdesk activity levels. They were influenced by the siren song of a vendor no doubt promising better analytics and an interface via web, of course.

Result ? After having transferred everything over, they found out that there are no reports, just pages and pages of data, summaries and percentages. So now, they have an inferior tool that needs, obviously, some bespoke programming to provide the results that the previous application already delivered.

Methinks that somebody should have asked a bit more questions about what the new shiny provided in reporting before signing off on the purchase.

I'm convinced that there are a lot of projects out there that follow the same result template.