Posts by Pascal Monett

Forget 2019's tech biz takeovers, here's the mega-merger everyone's talking about: Milky Way and LMC, coming soon

Re: Future Sky

I do believe that that is the best, most precise galaxy-merge video I have ever seen. Thanks for the link.

Well one thing is sure : we need to get off this planet and colonize Ganymede or something in the Outer Planet zone if we want to survive all the coming mayhem as a species.

Until now, if Canadian Uber drivers wanted to battle the tech giant, they had to do it in the Netherlands – for real

Re: If it weren't so crappy it'd be funny...

There is absolutely nothing funny about how Uber manages itself internally, the market or its non-employees.

That company should be scrapped and all of its managers forbidden from managing anything more important than a porta-potty, ever.

I'm just not sure the computer works here – the energy is all wrong

A UPS is a must for computer equipment wherever you are. You never know when there will be a perturbation in power regulation, a spike or a micro-cut.

I always buy the best equipment I can afford, so I'd much rather that equipment function without any unnecessary bad surprises.

Ah, the carefree days of yore

When companies would sell electrical equipment that behaved like a careless, angry teenager. Because back then, what was the issue with a large Gauss field ? The toaster didn't feel it, and your electricity bill was none the worse for wear.

The advent of the PC did a lot in helping us find out how to properly design electrical equipment that stays discreet and doesn't warp up the magnetic field of the entire house trying to imitate the Sun. There may still be progress to be made, but when I look at the amount of things that are plugged in around the house and without any (detectable) interference whatsoever, I think we've come a long way.

Chip-for-tat escalates: Qualcomm's billion-Euro bond to block Apple iPhone sales in Germany

This patent nonsense is going too far

I care not about defending IBM, but Qualcomm going to court because Apple is using someone else's chips. Apple is not copying Qualcomm's design. Either Qualcomm attacks IBM for violating its design, or I don't get how it can attack Apple and expect to win.

If that is a patent violation then we need to get rid of patents.

Full frontal vulnerability: Photos can still trick, unlock Android mobes via facial recognition

Re: comes with a warning that it's not the most secure form of locking your phone

Right, so there's no need to mention the subject ever again and absolutely no one needs to be educated as to how exactly face unlock can be circumvented.

Thank you for clearing that up for the rest of us.

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

Happy New Year El Reg

Thank you for your continued efforts in bringing us the bite, the schadenfreud and, most importantly, the news with a side of snide whenever possible.

I love you guys the way you are so don't change a thing and keep up the good work.

It's 2019, and from Beijing to Blighty folk are still worried about slurp-happy apps

I'm a bit surprised . . .

. . that China has not yet mandated a government-managed personal data repository that all developers are supposed to use.

Is that in the wings yet ?

Oregon can't stop people from calling themselves engineers, judge rules in Traffic-Light-Math-Gate

Incredible

For a country that bandies about the word "Freedom" with totally gay abandon, there's an unbelievable amount of states that have had nothing better to do than pass laws restricting said freedom for the stupidest of reasons.

It's good to see that the justice system is still rather functional, it's just a shame that it is needed to correct the total lack of common sense of the state legislators.

Detailed: How Russian government's Fancy Bear UEFI rootkit sneaks onto Windows PCs

I'm sorry, are you implying that YouTube servers are not load balanced ?

Because I'm pretty sure they are.

You can't fire the boss, or his cousin in Marketing.

Hacker cyber-gang: Give us cyber-cash for cyber-cache of 18,000 stolen Sept 11th insurance docs

Re: "the Twin Towers were not designed to handle a deliberate strike..."

IIRC, they actually were designed to withstand being hit by a Boeing 707, but I'm pretty sure they didn't plan on a fully-fueled one.

In any case, they never could have planned what happened, and the fuel load was most certainly way beyond what anyone could have foreseen at the time.

FCC tosses aside rules, treats Google to a happy ending following request for handy tech

"The FCC in its waiver notice brushed aside concerns.."

Well that makes me feel just fine. Because I totally trust the professionalism and care the current FCC takes with all things that concern protecting the consumer.

And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Great location, hardly used, unbeatable price. Call today !

Nobody in China wants Apple's eye-wateringly priced iPhones, sighs CEO Tim Cook

Re: Why can't I feel sympathy?

Because Apple is still reporting over $80 billion in revenue ?

It's nice to hear that the Golden Boys are punishing Apple's stock price, but that is really just an excuse for some to pick up some of its stock for a bit cheaper. That stock price is going to go back up because when you're making over $80 billion a year, your boat is going to stay afloat for a loooong while.

China's loose Chang'e: Probe lands on far side of the Moon in science first, says state media

Re: Lunar "nature" pics.

Oh they'll share, if only because it is a massive "see what we can do" to the world and especially to the USA.

What happens when a Royal Navy warship sees a NATO task force headed straight for it? A crash course in Morse

Re: Morse is ****ing great.

I am glad to see that the Royal Navy is proud of upholding such a time-honored maritime tradition. Reading this article I felt that this crew could very well have been the crew in Tomorrow Never Dies, with the (I guess) gunnery officer saying "Fine, we'll do it the old-fashioned way" and proceeding to track and hit the stealth ship of the Evil Genius - because they all still knew the old-fashion way.

Old-fashioned is good when it is reliable.

Open-source devs: Wget off your bloated festive behinds and patch this user cred-blabbing bug

Agreed, this is no bug. This is a functionality that was implemented in a time when password security was not even thought about in any serious way.

The fact that the new version no longer uses this functionality means the developers have wisened up.

The fact that said new version is brand new means nobody worried about it before 2018 - which is way too late in my opinion.

Millennium Buggery: When things that shouldn't be shut down, shut down

As usual, all this is down to the failure of management to actually manage. There is no excuse for postponing an update at the last minute ; if management had taken the need into account, it would have planned the workload accordingly and made the time available.

Unfortunately, management today has nothing to do with such mundane things as planning and everything to do with Cover Your Ass. Since nobody has the balls to actually impose a deadline, we're all stuck with waiting until we're back to the wall and then we can only pray that nothing will go wrong - which, given Murphy's Law, has a coin toss' chance of happening.

Re: It's what happens then authority outruns competence

Isn't that usually the case ?

Because, if authority was defined by competence, 1) our entire economy would come crashing down and 2) most IT admins would suddenly find themselves with board-level revenue, while board members would find themselves manning the Helldesk - and failing all Target Performance Indicators miserably.

God Bless written instructions

If you follow them scrupulously and something goes wrong, you've got your iron-clad excuse right there in your hand.

And the blame gets shifted to the guy/team who wrote the instructions, and to the manager(s) who approved the instructions.

Don't you find that there's suddenly a lot less yelling in those situations ?

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

"Machines can already surpass humans in specific intellectual tasks"

No, they can't. If you take vast amounts of data stored in entire rooms, and a processing unit measured in cubic meters, then yes, a machine can beat a human at Go, which is nothing to sneeze at.

But if you constrain the machine to the size of the human brain, the only thing machines are beating us at is precise mathematical computation and, until positronic brains become a reality, it's going to stay like that for a long time.

Bored IT manager automates Millennium Eve checks to ditch snoozing for boozing

Re: Oh to see something as good and far-reaching come from 2019.

Never going to happen.

Anything written in 2019 will be Agiled to death and completely unrecognizable by 2021.

The Great British Curry: Put down the takeaway, you're cooking tonight

You call that a cheat ?

"If you wash the basmati four or five times in cold water (I use one of these) making sure pretty much each grain gets a rub between your fingers, then leave it to stand for half an hour before draining, it will then cook in 2-3 minutes when you need it in a hurry."

My dear sir, if I have to fondle each and every grain of rice I wish to cook, I'm pretty sure it'll take a hell of a lot longer than the 15 minutes of simmering the whole lot will normally require.

When cooked, strain and then rince with hot water to have non-sticky rice. Yes, it's as easy as that. I usually use an earthen pitcher in the microwave. When the water is boiling, the rice goes in and gets a twirl so as not to stick on the bottom. The flame goes to minimum and the microwave is set to nuke for 6 minutes. When it dings, I give the rice another twirl and set the microwave to minimum for another 6 minutes. At the next ding the rice gets another twirl in the water and I check its cooked state. Generally, for Basmati you'll need another minute or three. Then strain and rince with the microwaved water and voilà : perfectly cooked non-stick rice.

You can't fail, even if you're reasonably sloshed.

Heard the one where the boss calls in an Oracle consultant who couldn't fix the database?

Re: Vindicated

And what exactly is "the Vienna situation" ?

I'm just a programmer. Please enlighten me.

Microsoft's 2018, part 2: Azure data centres heat up and Windows 10? It burns! It burns!

Thank you for a splendid summary of MS's 2018 failures

Pieces like this are ones that I keep in my personal library for reference, and to show to people years down the line when they have entirely forgotten (or don't even know) how things were.

Keep up the good work in 2019 !

GDPR: Four letters that put fear into firms' hearts in 2018

What's this about "Facebook's demise" ?

I'm sorry, I wasn't aware FaceBook has shut down and stopped trading. Mind you, I wouldn't shed a tear if it had, but I think the word "demise" is a tad premature.

Your two-minute infosec roundup: Drone arrests, Alexa bot hack, Windows zero-day, and more

Re: Drone arrests

I just hope that they are the right ones, and that they catch holy hell for having been such unsufferable gobshites.

Silicon Valley CEO thrown in the cooler for three years, ordered to pay back $1.5m for bullsh*tting investors

the 39-year-old tech wannabe had made a "tragic error"

Yeah, he thought he was more intelligent than the rest of them.

Well, now he's going to have the time to take a full course in Defrauding Investors 1 0 1, courtesy of the California Justice System.

In ten years, he will claim that he is the brainchild of Icahn, and he'll make a fortune.

It's a Christmas miracle: Logitech backs down from Harmony home hub API armageddon

"customers using undocumented Harmony APIs"

Funny how that sounds like Logitech had no idea how such a thing could possibly happen. It's almost as if Logitech was begging us to believe that there was some rogue engineer that put an API in place and Logitech wasn't aware of it.

Because rogue engineers are totally a thing these days, right ?

Apple yanks iPhones from sale in Germany – and maybe China, too – amid Qualcomm spat

Maybe he's being a responsible consumer ?

Slap for Slack chat app after US, Canada chaps zapped in Iranian IP address map whack

Did I read that right ?

Slack shut down the accounts of people who had been to a blacklisted country, but no longer were there ?

That is not how you do it. You use geolocation to forbid blacklisted countries from using your app from the forbidden country.

Otherwise, you are saying that it is the people from those countries who cannot use your app wherever they are, and that's called racism.

And, if they're in the US, you're getting sued. As you should be.

Uncle Sam fingers two Chinese men for hacking tech, aerospace, defense biz on behalf of Beijing

Re: Another anti-globalisation stunt from the anti-semites in the US govt

Donald ? Is that you ?

"MSPs are firms that other companies trust to store, process, and protect commercial data"

Apparently, they're not doing their job very well. They might want to start using some intrusion detection software, I hear that that is a thing these days.

Either that or they need to pay their personnel better and train them more often.

Google settles Right To Be Forgotten case on eve of appeal hearing

"Google settled the case out of court"

That is a shame. It means that no actual decision is going to be taken, arguments are not going to be heard and Justice has no say.

All that in the name of protecting the revenue of a corporation that has more money than it can spend.

Google obviously knew what it was doing ; it evaluated the man (a crook with a strong penchant for money) and found the right amount to shut him up before a judge could lay in with a decision that might hurt Google long term more than losing the case would.

Hey, two crooks would obviously find common ground, right ?

Ho ho ho! Washington DC sends Zuckerberg a sueball-shaped present

Well, well, well

Seems like we are going to be able to look forward to a new era in CEO life : governments actually holding them accountable, via court if they have to. Who'd've thought ?

That being said : Hey Zuck ! I wish you a very Happy New Year paying all those fines coming your way !

Serverless is awesome (if you overlook inflated costs, dislike distributed computing, love vendor lock-in), say boffins

No, no, you're not with the program.

After Serverless Computing, we'll be ushered into a new era that will be called Power-Assisted Computing. In order to properly adapt this paradigm, you should build a Computer Assistant permeated with AI and 7G connections.

Oh, and a holographic screen. It has to be holographic.

Re: not true IF DONE RIGHT, and for the RIGHT projects

Care to expand on that a bit ? I'd really like an idea of what the "right" projects are.

A year after Logitech screwed over Harmony users, it, um, screws over Harmony users: Device API killed off

Re: No more lock-in

It certainly looks like the way to go. Logitech is just one example of companies that don't actually care about providing you with a reliable service, they're all just faffing about, changing products and functionalities as soon as a new PHB takes office.

There is no long-term plan and no care of not disrupting the user experience.

It's all about getting the dough now, then screw you.

That is why I am convinced that true home automation is going to actually be open source - by the people, for the people. That will be the only thing that actually has a chance of working for more than 18 months.

Mark Zuckerberg did everything in his power to avoid Facebook becoming the next MySpace – but forgot one crucial detail…

I'm guessing more money than there is in the world.

What's this under the Christmas tree? A gift-wrapped Mellanox, for Microsoft? Say it ain't so

"Starboard Value has been screaming [..] to do something to boost its financial performance

So, doesn't care a whit about what the company is actually trying to do, it just WANTS MORE MONEY NOW !!

It's so nice when shareholders invest in a company instead of betting on it.

Facebook Like, social sharing buttons on your website may land you in GDPR hot water if data goes a-wanderin'

"website operators should obtain the consent of site visitors before collecting data"

Music to my ears.

Seems like GDPR is going to throw one hell of a monkey wrench in the current ad paradigm.

And that's a Good Thing (TM).

IBM: Co-Op Insurance talking direct to coding subcontractor helped collapse of £55m IT revamp project

What a sac of vipers

This whole project stinks from the other side of the screen.

The customer doesn't give the data to allow the project to go forward, then doesn't want to look like it's paying for software (wtf ??), then gets all huffy and claims that 25% sales loss is IBM's fault.

I'm not defending IBM, but if what IBM says is true, that is one shitty customer.

On the other hand, IBM, please : talking to the Agile team is what you're supposed to do.

Unless IBM manages Agile with a Waterfall approach ? Hmm, that might explain a few things.

Chip flinger Micron reels in production, expenses as revenue growth comes to crashing halt

So doing better than the year before, but a lot worse than the last 6 months

Doesn't that mean that the last six months were exceptional ?

How long is the attention span of Wall Street Traders ? Ten, or twenty goldfish ?

Newsflash: Twitter still toxic place for women, particular those of color, Amnesty study finds

That would be a shit-eating pile of crap.

It's not because you're being insulting that you shouldn't do it properly.

American bloke hauls US govt into court after border cops 'cuffed him, demanded he unlock his phone at airport'

"The officers also insist such searches are rare"

Of course they are - if you're white, that is.

If you're not, then they can apparently do whatever the frak they want with impunity. And they quite obviously know it.

Suunto settles scary scuba screwup for $50m: 'Faulty' dive computer hardware and software put explorers in peril

I would look for a different provider

Is there anyone else making diving computers ? And what's wrong with the manual option as backup ?

If your pressure gauge is a lot more empty than your diving 'puter says, it might pay to start going up, just in case . . .

It's beginning to look a lot like multi-threaded CPUs, everywhere you go... Arm teases SMT Cortex-A65AE car brains

Automotive enhanced ?

Pray tell, does it have anything to ensure that car control commands cannot be overridden by the effing media player ?

Or by the Internet, due to the frakkin' "continuous connectivity" we're all going to bask in ?

Because if not, well, there won't be much improvement, right ?

Brazil bested by hackers, Virgin plugs hub bugs, and France surrenders… records

"while the apps themselves are secure"

Not when they ask for access to your location, call history, camera and everything else your phone has.

Spending watchdog points finger at Capita for 1,300 shortfall in British Army rookies

Re: How?

My dear lady, it sounds like you've been Sir Humphry's secretary.