Posts by Pascal Monett

Atari would love to ship its VCS console but – would ya believe it – there's yet another delay. This time, it's the coronavirus's fault

"an unquestioning hype-led bunch of donkeys in the tech media"

In a tycoon game, that would be the trap in which the unwary player gets caught, leading to the doom of that profile.

In real life, you just do like in games, you reset the box, create a new player profile and start over. Except that, in real life, you're playing with actual people's money, not with a virtual predetermined sum.

But you'd only realize that if you actually played games when you were young. The management of Atari today has obviously not done that, they've only played MBA games, which are far more theoretical and where "people" are as nebulous a concept as "product".

Outlook more like 'look out!' as Microsoft email decides everything is spam today

Yay for single points of failure !

Isn't it just grand to know that, after years and years, and millions, if not billions, spent globally in companies to manage their own email, they've now abandoned all that for the <cough> convenience of cloud mail, and they're back to square one ?

Technology is wonderful, really.

Is Chrome really secretly stalking you across Google sites using per-install ID numbers? We reveal the truth

It is indeed practically everywhere

"it has Google Analytics, DoubleClick, Adsense, reCaptcha and other code on pretty much every site that matters"

Yep, and NoScript is set to block all of that on my browser, so no data that way. I have no doubt Google can still find ways to track me, but I'm not holding the double doors wide open for it.

Amid coronavirus epidemic, LG, ZTE hang up on Mobile World Congress, organizers call for 'no-handshake' policy

"shows no sign of slowing down"

That is a worry, especially since we have already crossed the Twelve Monkeys line of international spreading of the infection.

At this point, I think it can't hurt to link to WHO advice concerning this new enemy.

The Situation Reports might also prove interesting to some.

The show Musk go on: Elon asks Uncle Sam to let him fly his Starship over Texas, scores fat NASA contract

Go Falcon !

And great mention of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot ! If more people realized just how vulnerable we all are, maybe the suffering, poverty and wars would decrease.

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

"saving more than £1m in taxpayer cash compared to more traditional methods"

And what exactly are the traditional methods, waiting for somebody to phone about it ?

Honestly, I'm not sure AI is required in this scenario. Get satellite image, compare pixel colors, write the algorithm that decides which pixels are on a road and not the right color, flag it.

But they got it done with AI statistical analysis machine, good on them. I hope that that means a better driving surface for more people this year.

Iowa has already won the worst IT rollout award of 2020: Rap for crap caucus app chaps in vote zap flap

Well this seems to tick ALL the boxes

The managerial fools who authorized this whole thing seem to have managed to tick every single Do Not Do This point that any IT person with any experience could possibly point out.

I have one question left : what's the point of impeaching Trump when you bloody morons can't manage a voting project properly in the first place ?

Colombia accused of rigging .co contract for dot-org provider Afilias – is this document a smoking gun?

Of course you haven't

“We have not met with the technology minister or the technology ministry in private to provide advice or documents regarding the .co tender”

Of course you didn't meet in private, you met at an official shindig and just used the boudoir to arrange things provide official advice on the best course to tender for .co manager.

Hey, it's the Trump era. That's the Art of the Deal, isn't it ?

We surrender: SAP yields to customers, extends support for Business Suite 7 to 2027

"they need to have a clear business case"

Given that any SAP migration includes costs in the millions, if not tens of millions, I would effing hope that there is a "clear business case".

Funny, the more MBAs there are in existence, the less I feel that high-level, large-expenditure decisions are taken on anything based in reality.

Oh buoy. Rich yacht bods' job agency leaves 17,000 sailors' details exposed in AWS bucket

'a Bath-based jobs firm that targets "high net worth individuals" '

How unfortunate that they didn't target "high net worth" project managers.

Oh well, it's not a problem, right ? After all, it's not the rich people's data that got exposed, only the peon's data who would like to work for said rich people. So no loss, really. Right ?

Micro Focus chairman Kevin Loosemore cuts himself loose as merger with HPE Software continues to haunt biz

"a non-executive chairman"

Hallucinating. They actually have an official title for a guy that does nothing yet gets paid for it.

Nice job if you can get it, I guess.

Who's got the WD-40? Owners of Motorola's rebooted Razr whinge about creaky hinge

I've got to admit I'd pay money for Neo's phone from the Matrix. The screen covers the keys, so no inadvertent typing, and frankly, it was a cool phone.

If I could get a model like that when I retire and can allow myself to get rid of this effing "smart"phone technology, I'll be happy.

Orange has an elegant solution to Huawei question in France: We'll stick with Nokia and Ericsson for 5G networks

"using [Huawei] might enable Beijing to conduct surveillance and intelligence gathering"

And using Cisco will enable the USA to do the same.

Nice to know that there are some alternatives.

GitLab can proclaim diversity all it likes, but it seems to have a real problem keeping women on staff or in management

Something smells wrong

There are a number of points in this article that put a rather off color on GitLab. The fact that they made a video about how happy people are, and some of the women mentioned are gone. The fact that a report was credited to a woman who apparently had nothing to do with it. The insistence that diversity is important and GitLab wants to promote women, but fires them as soon as they reach too high a level.

Individually, none of these points are, as of themselves, significant, but I find that the accumulation is significant.

Something is wrong at GitLab, and there appears to be a coverup in progress. Not a good sign.

Somewhere, Google's financial bods are playing on repeat... What do you want from me? It's not how it used to be...

$162bn in revenue for 2019

And to think the US Government threw a hissy fit over AT&T when it was only making $3bn annually.

Shouldn't Uber freeze app accounts to prevent spread of coronavirus by drivers and fares? Oh, OK, it already is

Well whaddya know

The day has come when Uber finally did something right.

I never thought I'd see that.

Twitter says a certain someone tried to discover the phone numbers used by potentially millions of twits

2FA was a nice idea

Unfortunately, it means you place even more personal information into the hands of someone you don't know.

Twitter failed to do due diligence on security. Of course, security is hard, but that is my entire point. I don't trust any web site with anything more than I have to. I'd rather have my account hacked than have some miscreant get my phone number.

'Cyber security incident' takes its Toll on Aussie delivery giant as box-tracking boxen yanked offline

Re: Lack of due diligence?

From the Japanese ? I doubt that. On the other hand, I've not the foggiest idea what else it could be.

In any case, the board meeting at Japan Post where that decision was taken must have been quite tense, with consequences that differed greatly from the same meeting at HP.

Microsoft Teams starts February with a good, old-fashioned TITSUP*

Re: Amateur Hour 365

Absolutely right. Total lack of professionalism there.

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

Indeed. Way to go and propose something that is a complete security nightmare to justify your fiddling.

Vulture discovers talons are rubbish for building Lego's International Space Station

"a pain when using the pieces to create something new"

Um, it seems to me that that is not something that Lego encourages these days. My godson got a Saturn V two years ago for Xmas. I watched him build it and, all the while, thought to myself "okay, and when that's done, then what ?".

The number of custom pieces in Lego sets these days tells me that Lego has abandoned creativity in order to just sell toys that you have to build yourself and cannot do anything else with once it's done.

My Lego years are over, but I find my two large suitcases full of bricks infinitely superior to what Lego is churning out these days.

Universal Woe Platform: Microsoft shows UWP support – by yanking ad monetisation

"no longer viable for us to continue operating the product at the current levels"

You just go on like that, Microsoft, and you might find one day that developers have decided that it is no longer viable for them to continue developing on your platform.

So please do keep on looking at the short term. What could possibly go wrong ?

iCloud hacker perv cops nearly 3 years in jail for stealing and sharing people's private, intimate pics

Oh for Heaven's sake, people

Yes he was a pervert and no, he definitely shouldn't have done it, but for Christ' sake stop posting your intimacy on someone else's server !

AI snatches jobs from DJs and warehouse workers, plus OpenAI and PyTorch sittin' in a tree, AI, AI, AI for you and me

"DeepMind’s agent AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol"

Yeah, after playing about a billion more games than any human ever could.

So yeah, Sedol was beaten, but I can't shake the idea that AlphaGo kinda cheated. I'm pretty sure that, had Sedol played against AlphaGo after the same number of games that he had played, the pseudo-AI would have been soundly beaten.

I thought that's already what they're doing

Flaws punched holes in Azure cloud, Apple patches pretty much everything, Eurocops cuff Maltese hackers, etc

Re: What was the point

Information ? Alerting users to a possible issue and encouraging them to patch ?

Do you really want patches to go unannounced ?

Users have enough trouble as is keeping their shit together; if you don't blare the horn about it they'll just go on sleeping and nothing will ever get patched.

Cover for 'cyber' attacks is risky, complex and people don't trust us, moan insurers

"For cyber, it's a little bit more vague"

No kidding. I suppose it doesn't help when you read about how a malware nasty cost hundreds of billions to the industry. Where do they pull those numbers from ?

Okay, yeah, I've got the same idea.

WannaCry ransomware attack on NHS could have triggered NATO reaction, says German cybergeneral

"the idea of a military response to the software nasty"

Great idea. Something bad happens, go shoot someone. I approve.

Now, who exactly are you going to shoot, and how are you going to get in range to do so ?

Because, if I'm not mistaken, NATO rolling over Russian borders (or Chinese, or whatever) with tanks and troops is not exactly going to improve the situation.

Ah, night shift in the 1970s. Ciggies, hipflasks, ADVENT... and fault-prone disk drives the size of washing machines

This is what I love about reading On Call comments. You learn the damnedest things.

Have a pint on me !

That disk failure thing happened during my night shift as well. My co-shift wanted to move the disk to the third (out of four) disk unit we had. I strongly advised him against it, but he was very reluctant to call the systems engineer in the wee hours of the morning, so he did it anyway.

The unit failed, obviously, and now we had lost half our disk units. So the call was made, and I left that shift looking at the syseng trying to rebuild a system disk from scratch.

I didn't get any thanks out of that, but my co-shift had the balls to admit that I had advised against moving the disk, so there's that.

Quick, get the popcorn: Amazon Web Services says Microsoft's benchmarks for Azure are a load of stripe

So Amazon paid $5Bn in various taxes

From the looks of it, it seems like they are the kind of taxes you can't really avoid, like interstate taxon shipments or somesuch. Yeah, I note that Amazon paid $1Bn in federal income tax. Does anyone really think that Amazon's revenue does not warrant more than a measly billion in income tax ?

As usual, it's just PR to make Amazon look good.

Remember those infosec fellas who were cuffed while testing the physical security of a courthouse? The burglary charges have been dropped

"With positive lessons learned"

Lesson #1 : make sure the federal authorities are aware of the existence of a legal penetration testing event

Lesson #2: make sure that effing Sheriff doesn't have a working vehicle on the night of the test

Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages

Yeah. That's a pretty lousy excuse for not wanting to invest in some more processing power.

I know that, to scale your web functionality to the maximum of your customer base is a ridiculous notion, but you might want to make sure that you have baseline plus a comfortable margin at all times, and emergency supplemental capacity when the demand balloons.

I'm sure there are plenty of companies that are willing to help, it's just a question of writing a check . . Oh, right.

BSOD Burgerwatch latest: Do you want fries with that plaintext password?

Re: web browsers are hugely complex systems

Let's not exaggerate. A web browser install file is a hundred and some megabytes, an OS install is a DVD or three. Not to mention that the web browser does not manage access to the network, nor does it have to bother about how to write to the screen, or printing, or accessing the disk, or storing things in RAM. Those jobs are handled by the OS.

It seems to me that that indicates that an OS is a hugely complex system, much more so than a web browser.

Re: Surprised they don't use *NIX

I agree. For such terminal-only uses I would think that Linux would be the ideal platform.

The only reason I see is that there still isn't enough developers that work on Linux, in other words, it's much easier to find a halfwit that can bungle some code on Windows (not to mention managers that have heard of Linux are still rarer than hen's teeth), so companies use Windows on stuff where Windows most definitely should not be.

ICANN't approve the sale of .org to private equity – because California's Attorney General has... concerns

Good

It is reassuring to see that there still is something that can bring ICANN down a notch.

Now to hope that the Attorney General is going to provide the proverbial kick into this ant's nest of corruption and put a stop to this nonsense.

Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool

Re: And how do you know it's spyware?

Because, Microsoft ?

Re: How's the page layout engine tho?

That Word macros don't run is pretty logical, it's LibreOffice.

That the page formatting is not good is because Microsoft is not respecting the Open Office format (even when it says it does).

And if you're opening a Word document saved as docx, well, it was saved in Microsoft format, not LibreOffice, so it's obvious that it's not going to play well with the competition. Microsoft does not play with the competition, it kills it when it can.

Now I know that people cannot choose what format they receive documents in, but there's no avoiding such issues when you have different programs to open the same documents.

On my professional laptop, I have Office 2013 and LibreOffice. I use LO by preference, but when I receive Office documents I open them in Office.

On my personal PC, it's obviously LO all the way.

I had a problem at a customer site with one Excel spreadsheet that would crash Excel at every load.

Customer was unhappy because the problem was in his backup as well (let's not talk about that, the day would not be enough to explain).

No solution other than to recreate the spreadsheet from scratch. Thankfully, since he used it so much, he knew what was in it, so it didn't take all that long.

Still don't know what he did to corrupt the file.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

"Brexit means we are at last freed to obey whatever the Americans instruct us to do"

An instant classic !

Oh, and congratulations on your French. You have impeccably captured the essence of the French mind when it comes to swearing, and the British :).

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

Thanks for the clarification, Smooth Newt

I admit that, by the time I got to the last paragraph I was in a bit of a rage on this telemetry thing and I kinda zapped it. So now I know that they have the telemetry on the images. That's rather smart, because there is no email client that can keep telemetry from happening if the images are not blocked.

And yes, I use Thunderbird, as well as all my family, so I am well aware of the image blocking by default. What I did not know is that it also stops the telemetry. I always thought it was just to preserve bandwidth. Now I know better, and I'm even happier about Thunderbird.

"Around 0.5% of emails opened in the 'bird today, apparently"

0.5% of what ? A billion emails ? Ten thousand emails ? Of the average amount of emails opened every day ?

And how does Mozilla know if I'm opening an email without the telemetry to tell it ?

That sub annoys me on more than one level.

There are already Chinese components in your pocket – so why fret about 5G gear?

"It is perfectly possible for the West [..] to decide on a coherent policy"

Yeah, and I can perfectly well win the Lottery. I think the chances are about the same.

Sorry, nice article, but with Trump and his gang in charge expecting a reasonable policy is like asking a toddler to climb the Everest. Nothing reasonable has come out of the White House since the orange buffoon entered it, and nothing reasonable will come out of it until he leaves.

Meanwhile, yeah, it's chaos and infinite misery.

US government grounds drone fleet (no, not the military ones with Hellfire missiles) over Chinese espionage fears

"he hoped American manufacturers would replace foreign drone suppliers over time"

Sure they will, they'll have the components made in Taiwan in a jiffy !

Seriously though, this is a golden snouts-in-the-trough call for a company to create the required installations in the US, jack up the price tenfold and get the lucrative government contract because Made in America.

Oh, in order to maximize the margins they will, of course, hire cheap Chinese labor, but the management will be lily white all the way, so it'll be all good.

Google says its latest chatbot is the most human-like ever – trained on our species' best works: 341GB of social media

Broken by design

Google says that Meena is "built to have convincing chinwags with its human handlers", but it also says that "humans interacting with these systems have to do so in a rigid manner".

Well that is all sens of reality gone out the window. If I'm chatting with a friend, the interaction will have no rigidity at all. The manner will be relaxed, jpyful and possibly all over the place, but rigid it will not be.

In case you wanna launch your boss into the Sun, good news: Earth's largest solar telescope just checked and, yeah, it's still pretty fiery

Oh really ?

“On Earth, we can predict if it is going to rain pretty much anywhere in the world very accurately"

Really ? Please give me a web site where I can get that level of accuracy. Unless your accuracy is : on Earth, because my weather reports have trouble telling me which day it's going to rain. I can't count the number of times I check the weather site the day before, and am told rain, and then I check the weather the next morning and I'm told overcast.

I'm sorry, but if your forecast is only good for two hours, you haven't forecast anything.

Re: Reg units

What I don't get is this obsession with Texas. Normally, Americans only refer to the number one, the winner. The number two is by definition not good enough.

So the reference should be Alaska.

It's been one day since Blighty OK'd Huawei for parts of 5G – and US politicians haven't overreacted at all. Wait, what? Surveillance state commies?

Well that is something I can accept. That is the actual American Way. Just pull up your sleeves and do better, and prove that you can.

Oh, I forgot, America is just holdings and IP trolls now. Oh well, too bad. Let's go to Starbucks to complain then, eh ?

Re: Interestingly the US has a history

Even better : when The West was won and Hollywood established, it made a point of not respecting East Coast IP and stole everything it could and the kitchen sink.

Kinda resets the whole "Land of the Brave" thing.

US govt 'told Germany that Chinese spies bug' Huawei 5G kit. It also told the world Iraq had WMDs ready to deploy...

"America warned Germany"

America warned everyone, and told nobody why exactly it could say that. In return, anyone with a brain did his own evaluation and found that America is frothing at the mouth and can no longer be trusted.

How much longer are we going to have to endure this fax-simile of diplomacy ? America is not warning anyone, it is simply trying to keep the market to itself.

And failing dismally, as it should.