Posts by Pascal Monett

Yes, British F-35 engines must be sent to Turkey for overhaul

@ Robert Sneddon

The A-10 Warthog has an excellent reputation among all people who have either flown it, or been saved by people who flew it.

The adjectives generally used to describe it are "awesome", "deadly" and "badass".

Excuse me if I am not impressed by the F-35's mission ; it has yet to prove that it can indeed fulfill that mission. The Warthog has fulfilled its mission, which was to get in close and rain hell upon the enemy while surviving multiple hits. This page details the fact that in Desert Storm a group of 136 Warthogs flew 8077 sorties and only suffered the loss of 6 aircraft.

It seems to me that, even in range of AA weapons, heavy machine guns and light rapid fire cannon, that plane did a damn good job.

How DeepMind's AlphaGo Zero learned all by itself to trash world champ AI AlphaGo

Re: "Does the program actually 'know' it is playing Go"

Obviously not, otherwise we would have AI now.

Computers and programs know nothing, they just execute instructions and flip bits. It's the programmer that knows what he is to code for, and writes the instructions that will achieve the end result.

I'm guessing the atoms don't mind all that much.

Stealth web crypto-cash miner Coinhive back to the drawing board as blockers move in

El Reg should install this tool

I block ads because safety, but I would gladly give you processing time.

And since I spend a fair amount of time during the day with one of your pages loaded in a browser, it would be worth it for you.

What the fdisk? Storage Spaces Direct just vanished from Windows Server in version 1709

What I really like

This update scheme is marvelous. Install the update and play Russian Roulette with your infrastructure !

Guess which core functionality is missing this time !

Scramble to re-architect your infrastructure in 60 minutes !

Live on the bleeding edge of DevOps and see if you bleed to death !

As a side note : why are we finding out about this after the update was released ? Shouldn't there have been a warning before release ? Is this a case of nobody paying attention, or did Microsoft actually forget to say something about the new version's functionalities (or lack thereof) ?

The age of six-monthly Windows Server updates starts … now!

"while Azure users don't notice OS changes"

I'm sure they will.

Soon.

Yeah, but it gets broken a hell of a lot less.

Customers cheesed off after card details nicked in Pizza Hut data breach

Congratulations ! You have found one !

Come back when you have another thousand and we'll start talking about this little-known other thing called PayPal . . .

Yeah, because BitCoin is so widely used by brick-and-mortar shop websites already.

uBlock Origin ad-blocker knocked for blocking hack attack squawking

Hang on a minute

"Helme told El Reg that uBlock Origin’s blanket policy was not only unworkable but ill-conceived. Any information reported back to a website from one of its own webpages should be known to the website anyway: the site generated the page, after all."

So you're saying that anything reported back should be known anyway, then you knock uBlock for not reporting ?

If you know it, you don't need a report. So what's the problem ?

As for me, you're not getting a report anyway, because NoScript. There is yet to be a hack that can pass NoScript.

Aviation industry hits turbulence as Airbus buys into Bombardier’s new jetplanes

Sorry to rain on your parade Big John, but I'm French and living in France. That means that I have absolutely no relation to your "left".

Indeed, most of the time I believe you Americans believe we French are Communists.

In any case, you'll have to continue waiting for your dear 'acceptance phase'.

"if carriers are willing to install Sardine Class on A380s"

If ?

I'm pretty sure that, if I ever decide to take a flight again, I'll have to buy a 1st-class ticket just to have enough room to breathe.

I'm pretty sure it's coming along like everything else Trump promises : straight to /DEV/NULL.

Capgemini: We love our 'flexible, flowing' spade

That spade is sharp ?

In what universe ? To me it looks like a fat slob overflowing the couch. The Cheetos are hidden underneath.

Argh, my loafer just fell down the rope ladder! Yes, I'm in the Microsoft treehouse

"tree-based meeting spaces"

Right. Because rooms are overrated, I get it.

I imagine this is what will happen :

So, which treehouse should I schedule the meeting in ? Ah, Niagra is taken at that time. Too bad, it has the best view. Well I guess I'll just reserve Yellowstone, then. Ah no, I forgot, you have to be more than 5 to reserve it. Well it'll have to be Grand Canyon then. Damn, it takes 10 minutes to walk there. So, do I set the meeting time 10 minutes before, or will that confuse everyone into thinking they have to start out 20 minutes earlier ?

Screw it, the meeting's only 15 minutes anyway. I'll just set the start time to when it's supposed to start.

I hope Janet won't go to Rushmore again. She always goes to Rushmore because it's closest to her office. The we have to wait for her to realize nobody's coming, then she calls and finds out she has to go somewhere else. And, her office being on the other side of the campus, if she doesn't go straight to Grand Canyon, she'll never have time to get there before the end of the meeting.

I have a bad feeling about this. Maybe I should just reserve Meeting Room A in the central building as usual.

The Google Home Mini: Great, right up until you want to smash it in fury

With lots and lots of apathy.

He's been assimilated. He is now lost to Humanity.

Why does everyone always link to YouTube ? Can't anyone read any more ?

That is what they want us to think.

Release the KRACKen patches: The good, the bad, and the ugly on this WPA2 Wi-Fi drama

Re: Has to be within range

I believe that startup incubators have a bunch of companies that are in range of each other without much choice in the matter.

I know one which actually only has one WiFi access point for all the freelancers in the vicinity. No cables available.

Would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Here's a timeless headline: Adobe rushes out emergency Flash fix after hacker exploits bug

"Adobe, [..] proudly trumpeting"

Um, no Adobe. Just no.

You have no right to be proud of anything. Not of the ham-fisted way you bullied your Photoshop customers to the cloud, and certainly not of the historical catastrophe that is Flash.

Neutron stars shower gold on universe in big bang, felt on Earth as 100-second grav wave

"large amounts of gold and platinum were produced in the merger"

Having scoured the Internet for more information, this article cleared up a number of things for me.

Indeed, in my original opinion, neutron stars are made of neutrons. Gold and platinum are not, so how could a merger of neutrons produce anything else but neutrons ?

Obviously, the energy involved has something to do with it. As the neutron stars collide, the residue of the explosion and the inconceivable energies involved create and eject the matter that is detected.

It is absolutely mind-blowing to imagine the sequence of events that conducted to the presence of gold on Earth. First, not too far away from our future Sun, two supermassive stars orbiting each other went supernova in the very early days of the Universe, leaving two neutron stars in the wake of the unbelievable cataclysm. These neutron stars managed to stay in orbit, then gradually came close enough to merge, causing the creation of an Earth-sized amount of gold that was spewed into the local interstellar medium.

Meanwhile, our Sun formed and its solar system followed, and was showered by the gold and platinum from the merger, some time in our past.

Then the Earth formed, capturing some meager proportion of that gold, and now we are digging the deepest tunnels ever made by Man to recover said gold.

Mind. Blown.

Edit : This video is very informative as well.

Ethereum blockchain is sailing to Byzantium – hard fork up and running

2.5 million Ether is $2 ?

Looks like Ethereum ain't gonna cause BitCoin any problem any time soon.

Huge power imbalance between firms and users whose info they grab

"huge effects on things like competition between companies"

Silly me, here I was thinking that companies competed by making a better product. Now, in the 3rd millennium, they will just compete by having better customer details.

After all, who cares about the product, right ?

Keep your voice down in the data centre, the HDDs have ears! I SAID, KEEP...

So, the next '007 evil genius plan will be . .

to stop the London Stock Exchange by blasting a rock concert in the server room ?

Well, we've had worse.

Remember how you said it was cool if your mobe network sold your name, number and location?

Re: Now Americans can see

Of course they can see. They just choose to ignore because - hey look, shiny !

Elon Musk says Harry Potter and Bob the Builder will get SpaceX flying to Mars

Re: Colonist motivation

"What's really needed is an economic reason to go"

Nonsense. Humans do not care about economics, otherwise our global economy would be in quite a different state. There are people who are willing to go simply to be there, on another planet, and damn the cost.

Heck, there are any number of valid reasons to go :

- hipsterism (you lamers are still back on Earth, pah!)

- get away from the in-laws (okay, it's expensive, but it's foolproof)

- see a Martian sunrise

- die on a different planet than the one you were born on

- have a job (those buildings aren't going to erect themselves)

- be able to call oneself a space colonist

I'm sure you can find lots of other equally valid reasons from the human point of view.

As such, any company that can offer the trip is sure to have hundreds, if not thousands of customers lining up at the launch pad, begging to have their cash accepted. All any company has to do is make sure that it can actually survive financially and economically feasible is done.

Especially since you're not getting any right to complain if the trip isn't perfect - because you'll be dead.

Re: "The Moon is harder because it has no atmosphere"

Having an atmosphere is not going to make Mars any easier. Yes, it does have one, but a thin one. It is not, however, a breathable atmosphere. As such, I fail to see just how that makes things any easier.

On Mars or on the Moon, a hole in your suit means you die if you can't get to safety quick enough.

On either, you're lacking running water and have to extract it from the soil. On either, you have dust that will get into everything (okay, bonus for Mars on that one because Moon dust is extremely abrasive).

Nope, can't see that Mars is any easier to colonize than the Moon.

And it's a lot farther away (given current technology).

'Open sesame'... Subaru key fobs vulnerable, says engineer

Re: "a locked car with no trace of tampering"

Would also not figure very high on the list of important things to investigate from a Police Dept. point of view.

Not to mention that every single insurance company would point to absence of break-in and leave you up the creek without a paddle.

So not good in any sense of the word.

Twitter to be 'aggressive' enforcer of new, stronger rules

Go for it.

Please.

Re: "these guys are entirely serious about actually killing people and taking pride in what they do"

On the other hand, it is their job.

They risk being killed whatever happens. Might as well take pride in being competent.

I'm sure you are.

My wife, against my counsel, signed up to Facebook a few years ago. She used it for over two years until one day, out of the blue, she told me she was shutting it down because "it made her aggressive" and she decided that she didn't like that.

I was so happy and relieved that day.

Pulitzer-winning website Politifact hacked to mine crypto-coins in browsers

Re: "suspect I'll get complaints about it"

Be open. Make a poll. Put a page explaining what and why. Gather the results and then you can decide and be confident that your decision is good.

If it were me, I would basically say that if visitors agree to cryptomining, then I will take away the ads. From what I read about ad revenue, it's a hassle finding out what is legit and what isn't in the money you are paid. Better to skip the nuisance and go to a system that is clear and fair.

With readership approval, of course.

It's Patch Blues-day: Bad October Windows updates trigger BSODs

Re: "sue Slurp over breach of contract"

What breach ?

The EULA specifically absolves Microsoft of everything that can happen to your machine.

The only way anyone could sue over Microsoft's repeated failures is to attack the EULA and get the part that absolves MS of any problem off the EULA.

THEN we get to sit back, grab a jumbo popcorn and watch the dogpile.

Top of the radio charts: Jodrell Bank goes for UNESCO World Heritage status

960,000,000GB of data per day

Well that's another exabyte storage house planned then. Maybe they should go directly to Yottabyte ?

They've only gone and made a chemical-threat-detecting ring

"after three hours in open air [..] the agarose gel dried"

Well guys, it was a nice idea, but implementation will not be for mass consumption.

Chuck the ring format, make it a pendant. Give it to hazmat workers evolving in unknown conditions, working in 2-hour shifts, and you'll be on to something.

As it is ? I don't think a kleptomaniac would want to be caught dead with that thing.

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

Re: "What if decrypting that message is the KEY to getting or supporting all the other evidence?"

In other words, what if the message is the only proof ?

In that case, I'd argue that the suspect hasn't done anything yet, in which case why is he suspect ?

Oh, and before you go on about preventing terrorism, the 9/11 guys were known by the CIA and that prevented fuck all.

"encryption isn't protected by the American Constitution"

It doesn't have to be.

Encryption is protected by encryption. And that's the best protection there is.

For the rest, if all law enforcement agencies have is an encrypted message, then I demand they show what proof they have that that message is so important. If they have done their job, then they have suspect location and time, witnesses and DNA evidence (flawed as that may be) and a host of other clues that point to guilt. In that case, the message is supplementary evidence and they should be able to do without it to obtain a conviction.

Re: "if the fate of the world depends on breaking an unbreakable message"

Um, theoretically the issue is about crime and terrorism, not James Bond-level evil geniuses.

For that level, you have James Bond and his unbreakable-encrypted-message cracker : the spanner on the kneecap.

Indeed. There's no constitutional right to sell bread either. What kind of effing argument is that ?

Dell makes $1bn bet that IoT at the edge can kill cloud computing takeover

As usual, security was mentioned nowhere

A large list of partnerships, covering a raft of areas, but not a peep about keeping things secure.

Business as usual then !

Don't fear the reap... er, automation: Puppet hopes to make IT boring, says that's a good thing

"There's a lot of drama around deployments because they aren't fully tested."

Not to mention that they might not even have been fully thought-through.

I have the feeling these days that sysadmins do not have the time to project and plan, they have to put out fires all the time because management pushes things through that always have to be done yesterday.

The IT department that has a comprehensive list of all applications, servers and functionalities, up to date and with dependencies, probably doesn't exist.

As such, when it is time to deploy something, the approach is very much "do it and see what breaks". Oh sure, they'll have had meetings and they'll have defined what the end result needs to be, but nobody will have listed everything that can break and what needs to be done beforehand to avoid the issue.

Just recently I was at a site that had just deployed a new domain for a company that had been acquired. I was called in to help re-stitch the relevant links in their applications. It was a process of check, control, correct. Meaning that I had to go through all the apps I knew of in their existing domain, and check that the configurations and code were properly modified to include the new domain and function with it.

I was not given a checklist, nor was I aware that they knew what needed to be fixed. Thankfully, I knew what apps I was in charge of there, and I also knew a bit about a few others, so things were under control rather quickly.

I can't say that things were very well planned, though.

Apple's iPhone X won't experience the joy of 6...

Re: Numbers

"Will Apple's share price really be affected by only selling 245 million iPhone-Xs?"

Of course it will be. You're talking about the Stock Market, where you only increase share value if you exceed expectations. Merely matching expectations means only a slight dip in share value.

This stems from the same mentality that wants marketing guys to increase their revenue by 20% each year - never mind if the market has reached saturation.

Our society does not know how to handle just surviving. Every one of those multi-billion dollar multinational companies that rake in revenue by the boatload cannot just continue to manage their portfolio, that is stagnation and thus death. No, they are all judged by how much more revenue they generate, even if there is no room left to increase market share. It's the nature of an economy that pushes everything towards monopoly status. If you're not on top, you're not worth it.

Concerns raised about privacy, GDPR as Lords peer over Data Protection Bill

"The intelligence services already comply with robust data-handling obligations"

Yeah, as in "send everything to the NSA".

As for the rest, I can't help of thinking about this particular episode of Yes Minister.

IT admins hate this one trick: 'Having something look like it’s on storage, when it is not'

"any time you rely on humans/users to do something it never works"

On that point, I have to agree.

I cannot count the number of companies I worked in or consulted to who struggle to get users to archive mail. The mailbox is the number one critical application in many companies, and network disk sizes are always on the verge of overflowing.

In order to get things under control, often the only solution is to arbitrarily impose a cutoff date and archive anything older than that. Then you get grumbling in the ranks, although curiously most of the time the impact on actual work is minimal.

European Patent Office staff rep blames prez for 'slipping quality'

Re: why don't you fight to acquire some new rights ?

I am self-employed, so I am fighting for my rights every damn day, thank you very much.

@druck

Wrong argument. Home leave is not for people who have yet to relocate, it is for people who already have relocated.

For people who have yet to relocate, there is the Installation Allowance, ie one month salary bonus. Then there is the Expatriate Allowance, from 16% to 20% of the basic monthly allowance.

Then there is the possibility of Rent Allowance, meaning that you get your pay plus bonuses and don't have to pay your rent either.

And there's all the rest, which you obviously have not read.

Nice job if you can it, any way you look at it. Well, it'll be nice as soon as Batistelli moves out.

Home leave ?

I despise Batestelli and want his pension revoked, but 10 days extra leave every two years because you've moved far from mommy ?

I have to admit, if the EPO has money for all those advantages, it might be time to review the amount of money the EPO has.

Equifax: About those 400,000 UK records we lost? It's now 15.2M. Yes, M for MEELLLION

My mother's maiden name is Spongebob.

I've just checked that link and I'm incensed and somewhat frightened at the same time. Just by opening an account in the UK, you are automatically included in one or more credit reference agency's files. Is there any mention of that in your Ts & Cs when you open the account ? I'm guessing maybe, but maybe not. Can you opt out if there is ? Hah !

That takes me to wondering how things are managed in France. Banks lend money (sometimes), so they have a customer history. Do they share it and how ? I know that there is a national register of people that are forbidden from having a checkbook or credit/debit card, but that is not managed by a private company.

Questions, questions.