Posts by Pascal Monett

Australia down for scheduled maintenance: No talking to Voyager 2 for 11 months

Re: planes going overhead

I think that commercial airline traffic is located at a comfortable distance from said antennae and thus, that should not be much of an issue.

They don't avoid building radio satellite dishes next to airports for nothing.

Alleged Vault 7 leaker trial finale: Want to know the CIA's password for its top-secret hacking tools? 123ABCdef

"Hollywood is not going to have to adapt"

Dammit, it's now, not not.

I really need to learn to proofread.

"intensely embarrassed by the loss of some of its most valuable weapons"

Actually, the CIA should be more embarrassed by the fact that it didn't have a clue they were stolen in the first place.

Which clearly indicates that they might have been, and some foreign power has acquired them (or maybe more than one).

In the end, this kindergarden-style management of security concerning so-called weapons of state is the most damning indictment of all. Hollywood has a habit of showing the CIA as cool, efficient people. Hollywood is not going to have to adapt to showing them as kids at the lunch canteen throwing yogourt at one another and posting passwords in the hallways.

'Unfixable' boot ROM security flaw in millions of Intel chips could spell 'utter chaos' for DRM, file encryption, etc

And none of this is important

unless the miscreant gains physical access to your PC. And if he gets physical access, it's game over anyway.

Well, thank you for yet another method to cause chaos if some goon gets to my keyboard. I'm thrilled to know that there is yet another way he can trouble. Apart, obviously, from just ripping out the hard disk and chucking it into an external reader under a different platform allowing him to read everything.

I'll file this under Hollywood Apocalypse Scenario #4622.

Can you hear me now? Roadtesting Anker's first Bluetooth speakerphone

I have to admit, this thing sounds good

I have no use for such product at this time, but I will keep it mind for the future. No telling when it may come in handy in building a multi-national company environment.

After 16 years of hype, graphene finally delivers on its promise – with a cosmetic face mask

He must have been quite relieved to be on his way to Manchester and not still being grilled by maniacs.

A bit unfairly ? I think it is quite unfair to ask an engineer why the Government is doing something. That smacks of gratuitous put-down and I would have thought that there would be a smidgen of enough intelligence in a room full of Engineers to avoid that kind of pettiness.

Goes to show that education and intelligence are still two different things.

Re: Manufacturing?

Don't forget that, in cosmetics, it's like homeopathy : you just need one molecule of the stuff in the bottle to claim that said product contains that molecule.

Actually, that would mean that cosmetics are still marginally more honest than homeopathy.

Absolutely. The sentence is exactly as nebulous and empty as it needs to be while still making the clueless believe that there is meaning in it.

So, your beauty products have graphene ? I'm thrilled, but do they have Bucky balls ? No ? I need the additional bounce of Bucky balls.

Sarcasm aside, chalk up another CEO and entire company on my black list. He is clearly just in it for the money, and it is impossible for me to imagine that anybody in that company is not in the same mindset.

Hackers? Leap day? Nope, just plain old internet hysteria took down stock-trading-for-noobs app RobinHood

Good point. At least, until I went and read about the Dark Web, and found this site which states that "The dark web is a part of the internet that isn't indexed by search engines ".

It's still a part of the internet, therefor it is taken into account by DNS servers.

But your take on this is still plausible - maybe they want to limit the amount of visible DNS requests by handling it themselves.

Why do they need their own DNS ?

They're dealing with people over the Internet, which already has DNS available. What's the point of creating their own DNS server ?

How is that supposed to help them manage their customers (it didn't) ?

Sadly, the web has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'

"...could I borrow $60 (US) via PayPal..."

Well sure, if you can explain how you'll get to it if you no longer have a phone or a laptop . . .

And, while you're at it, explain how you are using Skype at a hotel. They don't provide laptops now, do they ?

Most scams are rather easy to detect if you just use a bit of logic. You're not locked out because of 2FA, you're locked out because your stuff got stolen. What good is it that I send you money via PayPal if you can't get to it ?

Take me for a fool, why don't you ?

Fella accused of ripping off Cisco, Amazon, iRobot, others to the tune of $2m by fraudulently demanding replacements for tech gear

"more than four times the proceeds of the alleged crime spree"

Meanwhile, telcos get caught selling your information and they get what ? Certainly not a fine four times the amount of what they made.

Sure, this guy is a scumbag and, at only 23 years of age, it's frightening to think what he could become.

But come on, 800+ years and he didn't even kill anybody ? The system is crazy.

And yes, I know that this is just the count of all the indictments and he doesn't risk getting 800 years. It's still nuts though.

If you're wondering how Brit cops' live suspect-hunting facial-recog is going, it's cruising at 88% false positives

Re: "inaccuracy rate of 87.5 per cent"

In any case, I'm quite happy that we now have some hard numbers on this tech. Up to now, all I was hearing was companies waxing lyrical about how efficient their "solution" was. Well now we know : 12.5% efficient.

Less than solar panels.

I wonder, is the Met holding it wrong ?

Oracle staffers in Europe weather cloudy job cuts: As many as 1,300 workers face chop after sales slide

"talking about aggressive hiring"

And now they're talking about rebalancing spending to revenue. It's not 'agressive layoffs', oh no dear, that wouldn't sound pretty.

As far as headcount is concerned, Oracle seems to be on a bit of a roller coaster at this time. But as far as aggressiveness is concerned, Oracle is only on the High setting.

It seems that strong-arming your customers into accepting a Cloud license doesn't really work, eh, Larry ?

If Tesco was prodded and probed by hackers, your data could be being flogged for just £2.70 – research

Wait a minute

"For less than £750 criminals can access not only your bank details, but online shopping, social media and email information too"

Well, okay, but criminals are generally intent on making money, not spending it. If they have to outlay some expenses beforehand, it has to mean that they intend to make a lot of money off your life, and even if there are quite a few millionaires around, there isn't one in every town. So the criminals are going to have to filter out the poor to get to the profiles that are actually interesting to plunder. At £750 a pop, it's an expensive undertaking.

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

Well I have to admit that I would find quinque sex raather distracting as well.

"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.

As Australia is gripped by bog roll shortage, tabloid says: Here, fill your dunny with us

Nice marketing move, though

It sure is a great idea from a selling viewpoint, however usage of such paper is best suited to bears-in-the-forest activity and not, as outlined in the article, as actual toilet paper to be flushed.

Now, as a follow-up, I'd like to know what customers actually thought of the experience.

Mine's the one with the 4-ply bog roll in the pocket.

Microservices guru warns devs that trendy architecture shouldn't be the default for every app, but 'a last resort'

So microservices are hard

When I read "people tend to be not good at defining module boundaries or having discipline about how module boundaries are formed" what I actually see is "people are rubbish at properly analyzing a problem and defining the specifications to solve it".

If you are not good at defining module boundaries, it doesn't matter what methodology you try to use, your code will be rubbish. And if, as Ken 16 pointed out, you add a layer of management indecision plus unforeseen technical issues, you'll end up with a big layer cake of failure.

Analysis. It's always the analysis that is the basis of all problems. When you forget about something, you do not take it into account and it ends up being the developers that try this and that workaround and the collisions between the workarounds compounds the problem.

If your analysis is complete and takes all possible factors into account, defining what a module should and should not do is much easier and also easy to follow.

Brexit Britain changes its mind, says non, nein, no to Europe's unified patent court – potentially sealing its fate

"clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

Yep, well, it feels like that is going to take a lot of time.

What could power an early-warning system for harmful radiation storms in Earth's Van Allen belts? AI? Let's see, say Los Alamos boffins

"the Van Allen Probes [..] recently de-orbited"

And what's the plan on sending up some new ones ?

Whatever it is we're calling AI these days, it cannot replace measurements.

Otherwise let's just make it official that we're living in a simulation and give me my bloody flying car already.

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.

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.

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.