Posts by Pascal Monett

Investigatory Powers Bill: As supported by world's most controlling men

You may be unfit for running for office - but you are at least aware of the fact.

That, in my opinion, makes you more fit than any of those clowns.

So all political parties are for it

It's just the citizens that are against it.

If I were a British citizen, I think I would be having a long, hard look at why I bother voting at all.

Experian Audience Engine knows almost as much about you as Google

"The company claims that it is privacy compliant"

Of course it is - it only sells your data to those who pay.

What is Hybrid Infrastructure? Glad you asked...

Sysadmin ancien d'hier

There's a bit of redundancy there, Mr Pott - kinda like saying an ancient old-timer sysadmin. He's an old-timer already, how much more do you want his back to be bent ? ;)

I am emphatically not a sysadmin, but I am clearly on the old-timer side of the path (and retirement is now barely perceptible in the haze of time), so I will jauntily assume the mantel of ye old mountain yokel and defend that "just someone else's server" position that you seem to dismiss out-of-hand.

Yes, I understand that IT is once again undergoing a sea change, what with broadband being more prevalent and data centers being something everyone apparently has these days. Someone might point out that this was inevitable. Fine.

I also readily accept that there are SLAs and contractual obligations and so on and so forth. Great.

Finally, I will not bring in to the debate the issues of security and governmental snooping. I will accept to put those aside to focus on the issue of in-house, or not in-house, which is the question (and yes, I know the article is about hybrid ; that just means that you're managing both sets of issues).

Now, for starters, don't bother me with the cost argument. It has been said in these very hallowed articles that going cloud is just displacing the cost center, there is no diminution of costs. With that out of the way, we can concentrate on five nines, functionality and performance.

When you go to the cloud, you get a rosy picture, a nice contract with a bunch of promises, and then you start finding out what actually works and how well. You might be able to do some special things, but if the Cloud is not compatible, you won't be able to do it, however much you ask and plead for it to happen. That's because you're just a drop in the cloud, and only if there are many, many more drops asking the same thing will the cloud change to you. So, in this configuration, it is you who are tied to the cloud, not the reverse.

When you go in-house, it's up to you to get the expertise and it's your money that is invested in the infrastructure. That can get quite expensive, I agree. Especially if, like RBS, you get rid of the expertise and hand over daily management to some external company that proceeds to royally screw everything up. Companies need to learn to keep expertise at hand - sometimes high salaries are worth paying.

Of course, in-house failures can and will happen. The cloud goes down for various reasons, in-house can go down as well. The difference being that you can, when in-house, identify issues beforehand, prepare mitigation procedures and, hopefully, implement them quickly when things go pear-shaped.

And if things really go pear-shaped, well you have your personnel at hand and are also there to "encourage" them to get it working again.

When things go bad in the cloud, your mitigation procedure is store the data until the connection comes back. You have only one course of action : call and find out when things will be coming back. Then you just might find out that they won't, because the cloud has been zapped by hackers, or because there were no backups, or because the datacenter is under water, etc. At that point, supposing you do have backups, you're still stuck with having to find another cloud provider, then having to set everything up there, then finding out just how hard it is to get your data on that new cloud.

You will note I have not made mention of connectivity. If your connection goes down, it doesn't matter where the servers are, you're disconnected and you'll have to wait until the connection returns.

So what I'm saying is that the cloud is not a better solution than in-house. It is just a solution with a different set of constraints. Use your server, you get one set of problems. Use someone else's server, you get another set of problems.

The real issue is understanding why you choose which set.

But it's still someone else's server.

Linux Mint to go DIY for multimedia

UI changes

Personally, I cannot abide OSes that force a UI upon me and leave me no choice (which is why I stick to Win7).

The many distros of Linux have amply demonstrated that the UI is easily configurable and has no real ties with any background process. We have today computers that are a million times more powerful than what we had last millenium, but Linux has had configurable UIs since way before Y2K.

There should never be any "change in the UI". There should only be "new options for the UI" that I can enable or not. That is a lesson that Microsoft still has great pain to comprehend.

Re: Er... NO!!!!

Well, unfortunately, yes. If we are to generalize a robust, stable OS for most people to use, it would be good if said OS had the user-friendly features of Windows without the abysmal collection of cheese holes in security that go with the original.

But that doesn't mean that everyone would have to use it. Linux is the paradise of choice, so you could go on using the Iron Penguin version while Joe User would use Fluffy Ballmer (for example).

Don't split Openreach, says BT, and we'll splash BEELLIONS on broadband and 4G

I would give them "regulatory certainty"

I would tell them that they are going to spend those billions - because if they don't, then they'll have no chance of surviving the competition that I will unleash on them.

Monopoly generates complacency. BT is obviously the fat Jabba who, being pseudo-threatened, waves a pudgy hand and mumbles something of a promise before turning his attention back to his bikini-clad slave girl.

Time to put a lightsaber through that.

Facebook image-tagging to be tested in Californian court

That is, on everyone who automatically accepts cookies and runs Javascript without control.

Which is most people, admittedly.

Google-backed Yieldify has acquired IP from ‘world’s biggest patent troll’

That sounds suspiciously like a convoluted way of saying "displaying ads".

Ransomware grifters offer to donate proceeds of crime to charity

Um, that is irrelevant

Hijacking people's computers, encrypting their data and blackmailing them is still a crime, even if you promise to share the proceeds with organizations that care for children.

You could claim that all the money will go to search for a cure for cancer, you are still a criminal.

Hey, YouTube: Pay your 'workers' properly and get with the times

"it pays out something far more valuable than money: attention"

Riiiight.

So Google, you'll be accepting attention in lieu of actual money for your ad impressions, right ?

Yeah, sure.

That fails the smell test from a mile away.

Brit polar vessel christened RRS Sir David Attenborough

Glad to see that proper British values and common sense won the day

Too bad proper British values and common sense couldn't keep this nonsense from happening in the first place.

I wonder what Admiral Nelson would have thought of such a scheme. I'm sure his reaction would have been quite educational - once he'd managed to stop sputtering indignantly.

The 'new' Microsoft? I still wouldn't touch them with a barge pole

Re: "software had become powerful enough to serve users well enough for years"

Just a nitpick, but it's the hardware that became good enough to serve users well for years.

Once upon a time, each year brought hardware advances that improved performance by 20% or more. In those days, you upgraded because not upgrading meant not reaping the benefits, and the ROI was indisputable.

Today, you get 5% performance improvement - if that.

Software has just reached a point where the bloat is not entirely capable of drowning the hardware anymore.

IBM's POWER cloud powers up almost a year later than promised

You know the old saying

Pecunia non olet

Have Microsoft-hosted email? Love using Live Mail 2012? Bad news

Oh, right now I'd say around three months.

Learn a scripting language and play nicely: How to get a DevOps job

Indeed. This whole article is just an official announcement to learn the lingo and what the dance steps are.

Sysadmin who is supposed to be able to code ? I don't know one who doesn't, personally. Nor do I know any sysadmin worth a damn who isn't fully aware of what is running on his network and how it works - well enough to fix issues most of the time, that is.

For me this article is a confirmation : DevOps is just the new moniker for what competent people have been doing since IT was birthed.

Windows 10 free upgrade offer ends on July 29th

Re: If I upgrade to windows 10 and I don't like it

Microsoft cannot invalidate your license key. You paid for it, it is yours forever.

I still have my Genuine XP disc and the license key that goes with it. That means that I can install XP if I wish - and have hardware that can run it.

Windows 7 is, of course, the same. I've paid for it, so I have the right to install and use it - as long as the hardware is compatible with it.

The day PC hardware will tell me to get something else is the day I fear. That day I will truly have no choice but to go Linux all the way, because Microsoft has burned all the bridges now and Windows 7 will be the last MS OS I will ever use at home.

Um, couldn't you have stopped at "Windows update disabled" ?

I did.

"The program's been a success"

No, it hasn't.

20% market share for one entire year of free download is NOT a success.

If Windows 1 0 was indeed the bee's knees as we have been repeatedly told, then everyone should have downloaded it. Win 1 0 market share should be in the upper 70%.

The program has demonstrated that Microsoft cannot capture more than one-fifth of the market with a free upgrade.

I count that as a failure.

'I thought my daughter clicked on ransomware – it was the damn Windows 10 installer'

And the cherry on the cake is that your OS is not going to go change its settings behind your back.

Microsoft : the best reason to go to Linux that ever existed.

'Bitcoin creator' Craig Yeah Wright in meltdown

Let's make sure of that :

Craig Wright : fraud and douche nozzle

Trump is a billionaire - being an asshole comes with the territory.

This numpty is nobody. Comparing him to Trump in any way is actually an insult to Trump because when Trump manipulates people his victims don't notice until they get the bill. Trump is actually far more shrewd than this looser, he knows when not to go claiming something that he might actually have to prove. Trump makes claims that are just vague enough and, when you challenge them, he takes you court and cleans you out.

This idiot, on the other hand, did go to court, all the way to the supreme court, and he lost all the way.

Looser.

Cops deploy StingRay anti-terror tech against $50 chicken-wing thief

Not any more. PoI is now considered a documentary. It was just filmed before the actual events.

Surely the police should see that the more they abuse these powers on minor crimes, the more they risk having them restricted or more tightly controlled

We would like to think that that is indeed what will happen. Unfortunately, mix a dose of reality with a helping of cynicism and what will more likely happen will be that the "abuse" of powers will quietly slip into the "regular use" category by virtue of wearing down resistance to the concept.

The article clearly states that this abuse has already taken place thousands of times - it is therefor most certainly not a mistake. The police got the tool with the use cases, saw what it could do and immediately started applying it to everything regardless of how it should be used.

And for all of you who say "I don't see what the problem is with the NSA slurping all the data" - THIS is exactly the problem. If regular police regularly abuse their powers even when they know they will be caught at it, how much more do the secret police abuse powers when they fully know that nobody will ever know about it ?

We obviously cannot trust the police, the CIA/NSA/FBI, or the government to abide by the rules. They must be checked, there must be oversight.

Or you can just admit right now that Democracy has nothing to do with your country anymore and publicly acknowledge that you live in a police state. That way you'll stop living a lie.

EU set to bin €500 note

Re: hoarding gold

But I thought Putin had already bought all the gold after tricking those high-rolling Wall Street types into panic-selling for fear of a crash like a bunch of newbs.

Server-jacking exploits for ImageMagick are so trivial, you'll scream

Developer forum is murdering ImageMagick

From the first few lines on that forum, I clearly get the sense that nobody is very impressed with ImageMagick's way of doing things.

My favorite comment thread :

It's really a command-line tool at its heart. The library is essentially just a wrapper around this command-line tool.

That sounds bass ackwards if you ask me. A command line tool is usually a thin wrapper around a library, for a reason.

and the beautiful conclusion :

And yes, it's a mess. That's why the much saner GraphicsMagick was forked off it… in 2002. People just never migrated.

In other words, ImageMagick is something that should have died at the turn of the millennium.

A Brit cloud biz and an angry customer wanting a refund: A Love Story

"We are the engineers"

Well let's see now :

- godlike opinion of one's own status - check

- inherent contempt for bog-level "lusers" - check

- expressing said contempt while still thinking oneself immaculate - check

- demonstrating abysmal social skills by spending 80% of the email exchange on everything but the problem at hand - check

Yup, you obviously are engineers. If you were in Marketing the company would have closed shop a month after starting.

Revealed: How NASA saved the Kepler space telescope from suicide

"balanced against the force of charged particles streaming from the Sun"

Awesome. There is simply no other word to qualify finding a solution like that.

This is what happens when Science and Engineering meet at the highest levels. Pure genius and exemplary DIY are the result. And they're probably not even going to write a paper on that. It's just business as usual at NASA.

Thumbs up Kepler team. You deserve it.

Intel has driven a dagger through Microsoft's mobile strategy

50 billion IoT devices

And nearly all of them will be shelved two months after being bought.

Audiophile torrent site What.CD fully pwnable thanks to wrecked RNG

What makes you think I upload ?

Throttle upload bandwidth to 1kbps, erase the torrent when done.

Yes, technically I'm uploading, a few dozen kilobytes.

"Users must maintain a high upload to download ratio to continue to download from the site"

That is a requirement that I have only ever witnessed on illegal Torrent sites. And it always makes me laugh before I go download somewhere else.

Okay, I do not download copyrighted material I don't have the right to, but if I have bought the official CD or DVD, I consider that I have the right for backup purposes (T&Cs be damned). So I go find a torrent to download. Then I stumble across these sites. I know why they do it - they think it fosters a "sharing community" by blocking the freeloaders. In truth, it just gates the community to those who have been there the longest.

So let them have their secure illegal download section. I buy my CDs anyway*.

* Some of you are thinking : but if you buy them, why not rip them yourself ? That's my first try - but some CDs have digital protection. Before bothering myself with cracking that - which is generally a chore that I prefer to avoid - I search for the kind soul that has already done the job and posted the result. If I find nothing, then it's on me. And you'll not find the result because I'm not a pirate, it's for backup purposes as I said.

Japan's Hitomi space 'scope bricked, declared lost after software bug

Re: Testing your code never PROVES it is correct

Yup, but NOT testing it just lets Production find the bugs.

And, in this case, Production found that the solar panel strut connections had a bug - but it's too late to fix that now.

Goes to show that DevOps does not work in space.

If you work on Seagate's performance drives, time to find another job

Re: WD Black

That is indeed curious. On the other hand, I'm an obedient little cheese-eating surrender monkey ; I set up my Synology NAS with 4 3TB WD Red HDDs (well, there's a Seagate one in there just for kicks).

I check out what WD Black is and find something that really makes me laugh : WD is making HDDs for, get this : CLOUD STORAGE !

If ever there was a "sucker born every minute" product, this has to be it.

If the Internet of Things will be SOOO BIG why did Broadcom just quit the market?

Re: think fire alarms that can call the fire service

The day they can't be hacked by the bored teenager next door, I might be willing to give them a try.

Honestly though, I think I'll be dead before that happens.

Because

Are state-sponsored attackers poisoning the statistical well?

Right, because new legislation has always been so efficient at stopping bad things from happening on the Internet.

US data suggests Windows 10 adoption in business is slowing

Maybe we're simply seeing the start of a return to normal operations in businesses that gave 1 0 a whirl to see what if, and decided that no, no if, and back to previous, stable, environment.

If that is the case, I expect to see more of this.

In any case, for a free OS so heavily pushed, the results clearly indicate a failure to impress the masses.

The Devils of DevOps stick it to YOU

Re: "nice, large projected figures"

And who can resist "8,000 times better" lead times ?

Certainly not the people who can believe that that is possible.

As far as I'm concerned, the faster you go, the less time you have to "make quality the top priority". There's something inherently in opposition between quality and speed, in my mind.

On the other hand. you'll break things a lot more, so it's a good thing DevOps makes you code like the wind.

The whole cloudy DevOps speedy demon future we're being pushed to just means that a developer's career is going to start in DevOps, constant panic and crunch time, endless releases and starting over, then migrate to legacy when the youngster is burned out and fed up with the commotion, then end with freelance consulting when old enough to enter the fray with a solid, cynical view of the whole process.

Business-impacting technology ? Why don't you ask 123-Reg how well that went for them ?

You're only young but you're going to die: Farewell, all-flash startups

So, Flash is like search engines ?

There's Google, and there's the rest. And the rest need to invest billions in data centers if they want to have a chance. Those who can't become Google-scrapers.

Flash appears to be the same game. The incumbents have the investments made and money to invest more. Newcomers are learning that the entry ticket costs more than they hope to earn.

This is pure capitalism. No amount of lobbying or backroom deals is going to change this market. You gotta come with the billions, or you can leave while you still have a car to leave with.

30 years on, Chernobyl wildlife still feeling effects of nuke plant catastrophe

The confinement shield won't do anything for the cuddly ones. The issue is with all the radiation that is around the nuclear plant, not the radiation in it.

Of course, not having the confinement shield would definitely make things worse.

I think you're confused with Fukushima.

Nobody has ever said that Chernobyl was wonderful or a success. Well, nobody apart from the Soviet government of the time.

Hubble spots ice moon orbiting dwarf planet Makemake

Silent means written but not pronounced.

If it's pronounced but not written, that should make it a ghost "r".

What do you call an old, unpatched and easily hacked PC? An ATM

I can easily imagine that this ASCII/EBCDIC issue is going to take mountains of cash to change, meaning that we are going to be saddled with the problem for decades to come - or until the mainframes start failing (which, due to the mountains of cash already paid for their maintenance, ain't gonna happen anytime soon).

Yeah but cash registers are typically not used by anyone outside of company employees - which makes them a different problem compared to ATMs which are used by anyone.

Also, cash register issues are the problem of the company (as Target found out last year to its great detriment), and its customers, whereas ATM issues are everybody's problem.

Finally, cash registers are generally under more direct surveillance than ATMs (and have never been attacked by backhoes - yet). People standing around an ATM generally do not get noticed by passers-by, whereas Joe Hacker is not going to have much time to muck with a cash register before store security is standing next to him and asking questions.

But yeah, Target is a clear demonstration that cash registers are a weak point whose security depends more on luck than actual defences.

China's Dalek-like robots fear only one terrifying nemesis: Stairs

78 kilograms, eight hours of continuous work

So it's mostly batteries then. 18 kph is a bit much for something that has no peripheral awareness. I hope it knows how to detect stairs going down.

Game of P0wns: Malvertising menace strikes Pirate Bay season six downloads

"targeting users with pop-under ads"

Once again, ad blockers and NoScript actually make the Web safer.

How to overcome objections that stop your enterprise from adopting DevOps

I am in the process of developing the ultimate lecture program. It will be titled 42, and I will systematically be drunk every time I enter the stage.

I promise it will be entertaining, enlightening, and slightly insulting to almost everyone.

Tour starts in Europe this century - watch this space !

How to overcome . . .

How to overcome the nigh irresistible drive to push your company to adopt Yet Another Fad.

It's difficult.

Because managers are very sensitive to peer pressure and marketspeak, and they live with the illusion that they are more enlightened than the keyboard serf that is tasked with solving the issues and dealing with the daily grime.

Because managers are paid more and we live in a society where value must be defined by a monetary amount, so the serfs mathematically have less value - except that managers never solve problems, they only create pressure.

But technology obeys no marketroid. It is possible, or it isn't. If it is, then marketroids can wax lyrical and invest in lexical creation all day, they are not doing the work. If it isn't, well even managers cannot declare the Second Law of Thermodynamics invalid.

In the end, you can slap any currently-trending moniker on it that you want ; developing applications is done one way : the developer talks with the user to determine the real needs, including the unspoken ones, then returns to his cave to hammer out the code that will make it happen.

Software development has always and always will be the same process : someone has a problem, someone else can code a solution. Inventing fancy new names for that changes nothing and is only done by those who do not code solutions.

Now get off my lawn !

Jaron Lanier: Big Tech is worse than Big Oil

I agree with your points about Disney and prison, absolutely. However, the solution to that is not Google, it is voting copyright length back to where it is supposed to be. That is a problem for Parliament or Congress, not Google either.

As for Google, let's not keep wool over our own eyes. Google is a private corporation, and has pushed the law as fast as hard as it could from the beginning. Disney has nothing over Google, but who is keeping Google in check ? Nobody.

Yes, copyright laws need to be reviewed and length of copyright needs to pegged at life of author, max (and no, corporations are not authors). Personally, I think 25 years is long enough.

But what are we going to do about Google's hold on personal information that is OUR property ?

NASA saves Kepler space 'scope by turning it off and on again

Good suggestion, Lieutenant, but that is not possible without inverting the polarity, and the satellite wasn't responding to commands, so that option was off.

Carry on !