Posts by Pascal Monett

Customers in 'standoff' with SAP over 2025 end of support for Business Suite: Who'll blink first?

"Delaying [..] may be a less attractive solution"

Translation : we are so going to up the license fee that your head will be spinning.

Mozilla locks nosy Avast, AVG extensions out of Firefox store amid row over web privacy

Gosh, I remember when Avast was free

It was a plucky little AV program, efficient and user-friendly. I dropped it when it started charging and dropped the free version.

My how it has gone all wrong.

EFF warns of 'one-way mirror' of web surveillance by tech giants – led by Google

Re: the bulk of Internet consumers are American

Um, sorry pal, but in case you haven't got the email, the Internet has escaped USA borders and most of its users now are not actually American citizens.

"The problem is complex"

Not really. Tracking is part of the Internet because the law was ignorant of the issue and the greedy ones saw an opportunity and, like cockroaches, infested the place. Now the law can be made to say that tracking is illegal and any company that is caught tracking gets its yearly revenue (before tax) as a fine.

Well, it could be made to say that, in countries where companies do not write the law.

Yes, I like sledgehammers. How did you notice ?

Larry leaves, Sergey splits: Google lads hand over Alphabet reins to Sundar Pichai

Just a second

"We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company someone who can make even more money - and we're a bit tired of counting our billions"

There, FTFY.

Pablo Escobar's brother is Medellín in the foldable phone biz, sniffing out new markets

"Pablo Escobar"

Sorry, any company touting that name as a reference earns an immediate boycott reflex from me.

Mayday in Moscow as devs will be Russian to Putin mandatory apps on phones, laptops, TVs

"the company cannot tolerate that kind of risk"

Yeah. Let's see just how long Apple takes before deciding that it actually can tolerate that kind of risk.

After all, it's not about morals, it's just about how much Apple will lose if it doesn't comply.

Ah, the beauty of Capitalism.

Sorry Apple, but if you think for one second that I believe you give a flying shit about morals, I have a bridge to sell you.

We took a shot every time Qualcomm said 5G, AI or mobile gaming in its Snapdragon 865, 765 system-on-chip launch...

" 'desktop-level' performance"

Nope.

Never gonna happen.

A desktop is plugged into the mains, a phone has a battery that has a finite - and very limited - duration.

Even if you plug the phone into a charger, it is designed for a heat envelope that is orders of magnitude less than what a true desktop - with watercooling these days - is designed for.

So go on and say that your new design is the highest performer, sure, but a desktop it ain't and never will be.

Trump Administration fast-tracks compulsory border facial recognition scans for all US citizens

Careful.

Second-generation immigrants are born in the country and raised in the country and are just as much a citizen as you are (*). A name does not imply that the person is not from your country.

* - not saying that 1st-generation immigrants aren't, obviously, as long as they've been officially accepted through the immigration process.

EU wouldn't! Uncle Sam brandishes 'up to 100%' tariffs over France's Digital Services Tax

Apparently, they have amounted to an additional cost of $500 to $1700 per year per US household.

I'm sure US households will have no problem dealing with that additional charge.

Den Automation raised millions to 'reinvent' the light switch. Now it's lights out for startup

"a modern-day retelling of the story of Icarus"

Stop trying to transform basic IoT crap into a great idea that unfortunately failed.

It was a bunch of lights. What the hell did they have to develop a proprietary protocol for, and why the hell did they have to tie that into a remote server ? Because they did what all the rest do : try to control everything.

Kudos on having understood that they had no chance unless the product could be used on existing sockets, but the failure was inevitable since they tied their product to the survival of the server.

You can invent all the manufacturing excuses you want, if they had started by making a lightbulb that didn't need a remote server to work, they might have made something actually useful and they might have survived.

No pity here.

It's Hipp to be square: What happened when SQLite creator met GitHub

"GitHub has to be both independent and neutral"

Excuse me, but if that were actually true, GitHub would not have let itself be borged by Microsoft.

Ergo, that is a lie.

Personally, I do not understand what made them accept being bought. Microsoft did not need to buy them in order to use the platform, and Microsoft does not need another paltry few million to pad its already well-padded coffers.

Of course, being showered with billions was most probably a very nice incentive, but if you're all about independence and neutrality, then you stay the course and remain independent. GitHub was not in need of money, so it's just basic greed that made them sell out.

Europol wipes out 30,000+ piracy sites, three suspects cuffed to walk the legal plank

Re: There isn't a real problem with counterfeit products copying overpriced tat

Agreed. Someone who knowingly buys counterfeit luxury goods is not someone who would buy the original luxury goods. They don't want to pay the price, so it is not a lost sale.

And, I would argue, someone buying a luxury item at a vastly reduced price knows exactly what they are buying.

It's only the person who is willing to pay full price, but gets nabbed by a counterfeit at, say 30% off, who is being harmed and the sale lost for the original company.

I wonder how often that actually happens ?

Russian FaceApp selfie-slurper poses 'potential counterintelligence threat', FBI warns

"could conceivably be used by the Kremlin for intelligence"

Anything on a phone could conceivably be used for intelligence. That is not news, it is not even a warning, it's just a fact.

Come back with an actual, proven risk that that app is under orders from Moscow and then you'll have something interesting to say.

Oh, I forgot, TLAs these days have no proof of nothing, they're just bleating FUD to keep the peons in line.

Re: Meanwhile

Yes, but based in America, so it's safe !

And it's monetized in America ! U S A ! U S A !

UK parcel firm Yodel plugs tracking app's random yaps about where on map to snap up strangers' tat

"we can confirm that it is now resolved"

But, first you said there was no problem. So all of sudden there was one and it's dealt with ? After you ignored an initial warning ? Isn't that convenient.

The worst thing about this is that it is something that affects you whether or not you have the app, since it is other people who get to see your details. So, saying "well I'm not going to download that app" is not a solution.

That is bad. I do hope that it has been effectively dealt with.

A little product renaming here, a little RISC-V magic there, some extra performance, and voila – Imagination's 10th-gen PowerVR is born

Re: And driver support?

Yeah, my first accelerator card was an m3D as well, back in the day. Wasn't too impressed with it after the first few minutes.

Then I got a VooDoo 2 and never looked back.

Still, it's good to know that they've been improving. This new gen is no m3D, that's for sure, but it won't be beating the RTX 2080 any time soon.

Boffins believe it was volcanoes, not just life, that made Earth what it is today – oxygen rich

One hell of a cycle

Imagine that. Ejecta being brought to the bottom of the sea over millions of years, reabsorbed into the mantle only to be re-ejected millions of years later.

Talk about a treadmill !

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, so the EU is investigating Google to get some more money in its hat

$40.6bn in earnings before tax

So the solution is simple : fine it $40bn. That will get its attention.

Internet Society says opportunity to sell .org to private equity biz for $1.14bn came out of the blue. Wow, really?

This is basically an organized coup

It has obviously been meticulously planned, and its success is due to the good ol' buddy network.

Now they're going to cash in, pretending all the while that they are innocent of all wrongdoing.

And, since this is the age where nobody pays attention to acts but only to words, they're likely to get away with it entirely.

Where are those pesky kids when you need them ?

Google fell for a real Looker, but now Brit competition watchdog's probing data biz slurp

Somebody make a statue for her.

Vote rigging, election fixing, ballot stuffing: Just another day in the life of a Register reader

I have to admit, if I am managing contest submissions and I get more than three submissions from the same address, I'm deleting all submissions for that address. Just out of principle.

And the submissions I keep will be counted as one anyway.

Smart, but not intelligent

"the other contestant revealed that she had paid someone to win the contest for her, and was suing the station both for the tickets and to recover costs for her cheating"

So we have a woman who wanted the tickets, but didn't have anything much to get her to win. Except her body, which she apparently had no trouble flaunting. So she - correctly - estimated that she would get attention with a lewd pic, but that was not enough, she wanted to guarantee a win. So payment to some guy for help.

She had the gumption to go through with this plan, but when it failed she didn't have the intelligence to think it through and went into a lawsuit guns blazing, but neurons not firing.

I wonder if her pic was part of the evidence ? I'm sure the judge would have considered it carefully.

We strained our eyes with Lenovo's monster monitor: 43.4 inches for price of five 24" screens

Re: Vertical space rules

Totally agree. When I read 3840 x 1200 I just groaned. How is it possible that a screen maker can consider 1200 vertical to be acceptable in a 48" screen ? My monitor may be only a 28", but 2160 vertical really is the only way to go these days.

Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC: Howdy buck do you get a solid 60FPS in Rockstar's masterpiece?

I'd better stay away from this game

I have enough time-wasters and not enough time as it is. Blimey, it does sound appealing though.

I'm pretty sure that my rig is up to giving a good experience, but my 980 Ti Lightning is no longer top of the heap, that's for sure. Looks like I'm going to be saving up for an upgrade next year.

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

So, booting in three seconds is not fast enough ?

If I may, 3 seconds is largely enough since the time between you press the button , take your seat, grab your coffee and get your mouse ready is going to be at least 3 seconds. And that does not take into account putting your glasses on.

Come on, anything less than 5 seconds is perfectly functional. Of course, I have a Windows history of needing to wait for more than a minute with Windows 95, to several minutes in a Vista corporate environment, so I've probably been beaten into submission on that point, I'll give you that.

Just remember one thing : better is the enemy of good. Don't go ruining something just because you want to shave another second off your boot time. Most people boot their computers once a day, if that, so saving one second is not really a heavy priority.

Then again, saving 33% can be viewed as a priority I guess, but that's just how percentages can screw you.

Re: Get over your Filesystem operating systems

So, what OS have you written that doesn't need files ? I'm really curious to take a look.

Before going to back to something that actually works, that is.

Stand back, we're going in: The Register rips a 7th-gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon apart. Literally

I have to admit that 0.0068 linguine isn't better.

6% it is !

You can forget about that Black Friday deal: Brit banks crap out just in time for pay day

But they have made a provision for that : they trusted The Cloud (TM) which told them it was always available.

Re: TSB

I just got a mail from Beelzebub; he was complaining about how cold his hooves were and that he wasn't use to that.

Re: IT? Not so much.

Here's a little story : in a bank in Luxembourg, a peon was brought in from a staffing company to oversee secure transmission of financial data in PDF format. His job was basically to drag PDFs from on folder to a different folder in a different folder in a different environment. Fascinating job, I know, but hey, apparently they pay (peanuts) for it.

Of course, he was surrounded by high-level personnel and management who were, as I was told, telling him to go faster and faster as the minutes went by. What had to happen happened, and the poor guy mis-clicked and opened a PDF instead of dragging it over. He closed the file immediately, but that did not prevent him from being fired on the spot.

So sorry, but you can get fired in IT just as fast as anywhere else, if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

BBC tells Conservative Party to remove edited Facebook ad featuring its reporters

I'll be damned if I'm going to go to FaceBook to get information on anything.

Sage to have its CakeHR and eat it: Scoffs cloudy automated personnel-botherer

"it will be essential that further acquisitions are made to build critical mass"

Of course, put that baby on the treadmill to IPO to ensure more opportunities for the MBAs and PHBs of the world.

Why does every company have to absolutely become a bloated behemoth like IBM or HP, or be considered a failure ?

Can't people see that it doesn't actually help ?

Explain yourself, mister: Fresh efforts at Google to understand why an AI system says yes or no

"AI Explainability"

Using AI to explain AI. What could possibly go wrong ?

Start by making AI debuggable. I don't care if you need an expert to interpret the trace, so long as there is expert around who can.

Then make it easier.

Stop trying to leap to user-friendly at all costs. There can be intermediate steps.

Cloudy biz Datrix locks down phishing attack in 15 mins after fat thumb triggers email badness

I did a double-take on that as well, and had to look twice to spot the subterfuge.

Taught me a lesson today : pay double attention when URLs contain "i" or "l".

Internet Society CEO: Most people don't care about the .org sell-off – and nothing short of a court order will stop it

What a load of bull

If you had gone public with the offer you would have been doing your job as a steward.

You are making the mistake of believing that .org was yours to manage as you see fit. That is patently wrong. You are the overseer, your job is to manage things to the best interests of the community, not of your fucking business pals.

Also, if there are only a paltry ten million subscribers, you mind telling us why the package is evaluated at a billion dollars ?

And, cherry on the cake : "Most people looking for a domain name get it through a company that is overwhelmingly commercial". Well duh, what non-commercial outfit is there that proposes domain names ? What kind of effin' justification is that ? Most food I get is through commercial outlets, that doesn't mean I'm okay with slave wages.

Asshole.

That's Microsoft price: Now you can enjoy a BSOD from the comfort of your driving seat

Because there is an order of magnitude more Windows developers than there are Linux developers, and manglement can't understand the concept of a stable platform.

RuneScape bloke was wrongly sacked after reading veep's salary details on office printer

Brilliant idea. I trust that these thousands of printers all come with a mailing clerk who will absolutely not read the content of the printout and slip it into an envelope automagically labelled with my address ?

No ?

Then what's the point ? I don't print for the pleasure of using paper and ink.

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

An RPi as a desktop computer ?

I'm sure that the latest generation can be used as a desktop computer, but I am also quite sure that it is not a desktop computer.

At least, not compared to mine.

And, when I check the specifications, I can see the difference.

The CPU is a quad core 1.5GHz thing. Respectable, but an i7 6700 trounces that without breaking a sweat.

The RAM can go to 4GB, and it is DDR4 - congrats. I have 32GB.

The Pi has Gigabit Ethernet, just like mine.

As for video, I have a MSI GeForce GTX 980 TI LIGHTNING with 6GB of DDR5 RAM. I doubt the Pi holds a candle to that.

That said, the Pi 4 has one great advantage over my rig : it can apparently operate on a 2.5A power supply.

That's not enough to turn on my CPU.

So, the Pi is undoubtedly a respectable little thing, and if Apollo 13 had that, they would have had less energy problems and largely enough computation power.

But it is definitely not a desktop.

Move over, Alien vs. Predator: Signing into AWS with an Office 365 login is a real crossover

"This opens up AWS SSO to many small businesses"

Step by step, creep by creep, business is slowly being tied into The Cloud (TM) whether they want to or not. In the end, they will be completely borged by it, and when (not if) it goes down, the entire world will be blocked for an undefined amount of time.

Yay the future.

Brian Eno's latest composition: A giant Christmas card with Julian Assange on it

He has been accused of, even when it is Assange which I despise, does not equal he is guilty of.

Sounds like one hell of a family

Obvious troll is being obvious

ESA toasts 10% budget boost by stretching ISS support out to 2030

Moderately ?

I see nothing moderate in either of those billionaires, or in any billionaire actually. You've got quite some cheek to suggest that they are "moderately" wealthy. Either that or you should get back in touch with reality.

The only thing I see in favor of these two is that they are doing what NASA cannot do any more : getting Humanity back into space. I'm willing to forgive them their excesses for that reason.

We've found it... the last shred of human decency in an IT director – all for a poxy Unix engineer

Indeed

Too often these days a boss takes the paycheck and skirts off when the fallout arrives.

This one had the balls to stand up and take responsibility for his team.

I would have been proud to work for a guy like that, and made every effort to ensure that he didn't need to stand up for me.

Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?

Security passcodes

Okay, maybe there is a point in requiring a passcode to call the lift, but what's the point of a passcode to actually use it ? That is not security, that is pure CIA-level paranoia. The building manager needs to remind himself that he is not managing the Pentagon. And that poor fellow (assuming he survived the ordeal) probably had a long, deep think about just how "secure" he is if he can die of a heart attack because next time the medics might not be able to get to him in time to save him.

I'm sure he was suitably impressed when he got the building tour at the start of his life there, but if I were told that, in order to get to and from my flat, I'd have to know more codes than what I need to move around in the banks I consult for, I'd smile, say thank you for the tour and never call back.

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

"the US Department of Labor has no right to enforce labor laws"

The slapdown on that is going to be epic, I hope.

This week, we give thanks to Fortinet for reminding us what awful crypto with hardcoded keys looks like

"Departments will have 270 days to get systems in place"

Why delegate that to individual departments ? Bug reporting could very well be centralized, there's no need to duplicate that a dozen times or more, with a dozen times the bugs and mishaps to go with it.

The cybersecurity department should handle that, and could oversee that the departments get on with correcting the bugs at the same time.

Waste of money, time and resources.

Astroboffins peeved as SpaceX's Starlink sats block meteor spotting – and could make us miss a killer asteroid

"Accurate [..] predictions are essential for understanding the hazard they pose to spacecraft"

Well it looks like, once 12000 of those birds are in place, the prediction will depend on how many get hit on a given day.

Which is not going to increase the orbital garbage problem, no sir.

Christmas in tatters for Nottinghamshire tots after mayor tells them Santa's too busy

My wife is an elementary school teacher

Every year in December, she has to deal with the kids who absolutely want to tell the "truth" to the littler ones.

Once the tears have dried, she tells them : "They don't believe any more, so of course Mum and Dad place the presents. Santa does not come for the kids who don't believe."

Works every time.