Posts by Pascal Monett

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

Re: MS are seriously out of touch with how Windows is used in small/medium enterprise

No, it is you who are seriously out of touch with how Borkzilla deems you should be running your IT infrastructure.

Thanks for the tip.

Hope that doesn't get reversed by Redmond !

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

I say kudos to the "junior person".

Apparently, he was the only one to control that the job had had the expected outcome.

Sorry, but it doesn't say much of all the "experts".

That said, I learned that lesson the hard way as well . . .

Well, there's nothing like proof something need to be done . . .

Cruise's valuation halved after its driverless car hit and dragged a woman

"We've always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products"

Yeah. Well, making the Founding Fathers black is really going to rock the boat on that score.

The real question is : how much other information is going to be biased and transformed with Google AI ?

After all, bias can go both ways. Either you show the truth, or you don't.

And if you don't, you can't be trusted. Cleopatra wasn't black, however much some people in Hollywood would like to think.

Legal eagles demand $6B in Tesla stock after overturning Musk's mega pay package

US lawyers

They are a species that is in dire need of becoming endangered.

So you spent a few hundred hours preparing and presenting a case ? That does not justify $300K/hour in any way, shape or form. You did your fucking job, and for that you should be paid no more than your already exorbitant $1000/hour fee.

This is ambulance chasing at its finest. I certainly do not support His Muskiness in any way, but these scum need to be put down. Period.

India demands beta AIs secure government permission before going public

"labelling deepfakes with permanent unique metadata or other identifiers"

I really wonder how that will work reliably. I imagine that some kind of watermark will be visible on the video, likely not in the middle. So, if it is at the bottom or along a side, anyone who cares can just crop the watermark out and republish the video without it. If the watermark is on the top, that would likely risk cropping the person's head and that would rather severely impact the efficiency of the deepfake, so maybe the watermark should be on the top.

But, given that I have no idea what the identifiers are supposed to be, I might just be spouting nonsense.

LockBit's contested claim of fresh ransom payment suggests it's been well hobbled

Ah, SolarWinds123

With security like that, you don't need to be a hacker to get in.

French cloud Scaleway starts renting Alibaba's RISC-V SoC

Wow, what a deal

"Les Services BETA peuvent être modifiés, suspendus ou définitivement interrompus par SCALEWAY sans préavis et sans que ceci ne donne le droit au Client à une quelconque indemnité."

Meaning the service can be suspended or cancelled without warning and without penality for Scaleway.

So you've got it only as long as Scaleway can be arsed to let you have it, and if it fails, it's your problem.

And to think that there are numpties who will really think they're getting a good deal for their production environment.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Wel, given that that is exactly what it was meant to do, then it's a success, isn't it ?

Re: HDMI is dead

And that is all it deserves.

The content nazis can go fuck themselves.

EU-turn! Now Apple says it won't banish Home Screen web apps in Europe

"We have received requests"

Oh, so that's all you need ? Requests ? Not even many requests, just requests.

Okay then, here's another request : make your smartphone batteries user-replaceable, please.

There, you've got the request. When will that happen ? Never ? So there's more to it than just requests. Probably the fact that shutting down an entire continent of a market might make your money pile grow a bit slower.

Methinks that is more likely to be the cause.

The batteries on Odysseus, the hero private Moon lander, have run out

"Our now proven robust lunar program"

Now proven ? You've launched one mission and it landed on its side. That doesn't sound very proven to me.

But hey, nothing like tootin' your own horn, right ?

Judge orders NSO to cough up Pegasus super-spyware source code

"It has helped to save thousands of lives over recent years."

Really ?

Prove it.

Incoming wave of AI is making buying PCs riskier for businesses

Nobody needs to buy an AI PC

But Borkzilla, Chipzilla & co need to sell AI PCs on the understanding that more cores, more GHz and more pixels is soo last millenium, so the only thing that marketing can think of to lure in the bait customer is now AI.

I'm sure that, by the time AI has tired itself out in marketing eyes, quantum will be the Next Best Thing^TM.

But what will come after that ? I'm guessing marketing will have an apocalypse moment then.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

"thankfully these data errors are incredibly infrequent"

Yes. I'm sure that is quite reassuring for the people who do become victims of such errors.

They undoubtedly console themselves by thinking how absolutely infrequent such errors are.

Especially when the error is brought to light, and police forces continue to confuse them for months afterwards.

Stack Overflow to charge LLM developers for access to its coding content

"traffic to Stack Overflow has steadily dropped over time"

And that will continue in inverse relation with just how much Stack Overflow considers itself a money-making tool versus a public utility.

The more Stack orients itself towards making money and locking down its content, the less people will go to it.

Tek Tips is a site that has never changed its objective : being useful to the public. It has competent people in every one of its forums, and I have never had a bad experience on that site.

Stack, on the other hand, has form in restricting its content unless you pay, thereby declaring its basic intent. Stack is not my first choice destination to solve a problem I might have.

Companies flush money down the drain with overfed Kubernetes cloud clusters

"analysis of more than 4,000 clusters [..] prior to optimization"

Sure. It's called hindsight.

Once the project is rolling in production, it's easy to know what resources you need after a while.

It's a lot more difficult to forecast what you need before the project is started, especially when you have no experience managing projects in the cloud.

Companies will adjust their resources soon enough - the beancounters will see to that.

Vietnam may ban virtual assets to fix its bad rep for money laundering

"regulate virtual assets"

All assets are virtual these days. Since COVID, I have touched actual, physical money less than half a dozen times. Funny money does nothing to improve on that.

Meta kills Facebook News in the US and Australia

The Beaverton

Thanks for the tip. I've checked it out and now, it's bookmarked.

NTT boss takes early retirement to atone for data leak

Taking the fall

So he's resigning because of something (one of) his predecessor(s) did ?

Wow. our CEOs over here really have it good. Most of them wouldn't resign even when they did screw up. Those who do resign are mostly made to do so by the Board.

Honor ? Yeah, they've read about it.

Water worries flood in as chip industry and AI models grow thirstier

Re: I've said many times that...

So have I.

It would have been so much more reasonable to build fabs in the area of the Great Lakes. You know, where there's water ?

Yeah, but the tax breaks were not as good, apparently.

Fine. I'll just wait for the day where you have to shut down your precious fabs because the Colorado River is dry and you can't continue production. At the rythm it's being drained, that won't take so long.

And, at that point, you can kiss your tax breaks, and your ass, good bye.

And you deserve that.

Electronic Arts frags hundreds of workers 'to grow fandom'

"now Electronic Arts is letting workers go"

I'm really sorry, but anyone working for EA, given it's history, is just asking for the pain.

Oracle Cerner system implementation risks future patient deaths, coroner warns

"the new system does not have that functionality"

Why ? The previous one did. Who decided that that was not needed ?

Because somebody made that decision, and now, somebody is dead directly for lack of that functionality.

I think a lawsuit for wrongful death is the least that should happen.

Toyota admits its engines are overrated – by its own power testing software

"the ministry confirmed 'fraudulent acts' had been committed"

Oh, my goodness. Toyota also has a rogue engineer ?

Nutanix doesn't expect a rush of VMware refugees – maybe for years

Land and expand

I like the ring of that. It's like settlers reaching a new world.

Whether the locals will be extinguished or not is another matter . . .

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

Ah, Partition Magic

I still have the installer for it. I have used it extensively and it has performaed flawlessly without fail. I have never found a better, easier to use tool to resize and/or move partitions.

A purchase I have never regretted.

Uncle Sam tells nosy nations to keep their hands off Americans' personal data

Re: Pot, meet kettle...

Entirely agree. It is very rich to hear this coming from the White House, when the US is a country which has already been subject to privacy treaties and addendums, just to try and keep the data slurping slightly in check.

If it wasn't for Max Schrems, the US would still be the black hole hoovering every single bit of data it wants to be. And I'm not sure that the valiant efforts of Schrems and company have really put any sort of dent into that practice.

Nvidia lures senior autonomous car developer from China's Baidu

Ah yes, jaywalking laws

Those things that were litterally created by and for automotive companies to limit their responsibility for people on foot getting run over by carelesss people in cars . . .

Thankfully, here in France (and in most of Europe, unless I'm mistaken), jaywaling laws have been repealed. It's the person on foot who has priority, always, whatever the conditions.

Google wants regulators to take Microsoft down a notch before it stifles AI

Re: Linux is a better OS anyway

And it has been for ages, but that has not made people flock to it.

Unfortunately.

That home router botnet the Feds took down? Moscow's probably going to try again

"Perform a hardware factory reset"

And poof! say goodbye to your entire, lovingly-crafted network setup.

I've got a hunch that there will be a fair number of people who won't want the hassle and will prefer to roll the dice.

Not saying they're right, just saying they couldn't be bothered.

Microsoft's February Windows 11 security update unravels at 96% for some users

"installation problems"

What ? The vaunted Borkzilla AI can't sort that out at install time ?

Then what good is it ?

Oh, silly me, I forgot. It's marketing, not technical . . .

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

"Jensen Huang believes"

I'm sure he does. He's an electrical engineer, not a programmer. Obviously, he thinks that, as long as you can find some code on the Web, you don't need a programmer.

Unfortunately, there is no pseudo-AI that is going to code Salesforce, or SAS, or an ERP. I don't care that there are now "prompt engineers", you still have to know where to place the prompt in the code.

Programmers are not going away any time soon.

Nevada sues to deny kids access to Meta's Messenger encryption

So, he's thinking about the children, eh ?

Somebody check his hard disks to find out just how hard he's thinking about children . . .

Back from the dead: LockBit taunts cops, threatens to leak Trump docs

Leak Trump docs ?

Please don't wait, go ahead. Leak'em now, we could use a good laugh.

72 flights later and a rotor blade short, Mars chopper loses its fight with physics

"nothing short of jaw-dropping"

Par for the course for successful NASA missions.

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

"replete with AI-based noise cancellation"

Sorry, since when does noise cancellation need pseudo-AI ?

We already have noise cancelling headphones, and they work fine without bullshit AI.

Talk about polishing a turd . . .

AT&T's apology for Thursday's outage should stretch to a cup of coffee

"We are investing billions to grow our network"

About fucking time.

Intuitive Machines' lunar lander tripped and fell

"Touchdown! This week, America landed a spacecraft on the Moon for the first time since 1972"

Yeah, on its side.

After two other countries did so much more successfully.

But hey, never miss a chance to USA! USA ! USA!

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

"more than a third of respondents intend to replace their current handset within the next year"

Ok, but how many respondents did not intend to replace their phone at all ?

Because I don't intend to replace my current phone until I retire.

In 8 years.

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

"This is messed up"

Oh, Elon, there are so many things that are messed up in this world.

And you are doing nothing to help.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

"willing to sell Bing, which you wouldn't do if it was a strategic asset."

Ooh, burn. So, Borkzilla wanted to one-up Google, found out the hard way that it's not so easy, and is now stuck with something it can't kill because it integrated the damn thing into every part of its OS.

Sounds like schadenfreude to me . . .

Lenovo debuts AI PCs that have specs a lot like vanilla PCs with this year's accelerated CPUs

"enabling the interaction with physical objects"

Um, like the pen I have in front of me on the table ?

I am willing to believe that a laptop has more power than a AR ski goggles, but you're not walking around with a laptop, so interaction with physical objects is pretty much going to be limited to, oh, my coffee cup is behind my screen, <reach out and grab it>.

Pff. Marketing. I never stop being amazed at what nonsense they think of to make us spend our hard-earned.

Judge slaps down law firm using ChatGPT to justify six-figure trial fee

"relying on ChatGPT to do anything related to their jobs could be a bad idea"

Yeah but, have you factored in the basic human tendancy to want to get something for nothing ?

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

"Applications that struggle with latency [..] will also benefit"

How ?

WiFi is local. It's all very nice to have a mutli-GB connection to the nearest fiber link, but if that fiber is only 1GB, I fail to see how so very much better WiFi 7 is going to be.

To be clear : I have a 1GBps fiber link coming right into my home office. Thanks to that, we can watch TV without lag, while my home PC is torrenting Linux ISOs, my wife is on the Internet on her smartphone and her laptop, and my daughter is downloading God knows what while also watching whatever it is she finds interesting.

Of all of that equipment, the only thing actually tethered to a physical line is my home PC, with its GB network card connected to my home switch that can handle GB connections and is linked to the Orange Box, thus to the fiber that allows everything to communicate with them thar intartubes.

From where I sit, WiFi 7 is not going to increase the speed of my fiber. So the fiber is the limit, the bottleneck.

And I don't think that's going to be a problem for my household. WiFi 6/5/whatever is working fine here, thank you. Including WiFi 7 in Windows 11 which is mainly used in tower PCs (which have a GB Ethernet connection already) and maybe some fondleslabs, is not going to change the universe, as far as I can see.

But yeah, I know the drill. Marketing needs to feed . . .

Some Intel Core chips keep crashing, game devs complain

"He observes that Intel seems unlikely to improve its verification story"

Of course. AMD is now eating Intel's lunch. Now is not the time to do proper engineering procedures.

Now is the time to boost the Ghz and sell ! sell ! sell !

Intel will leave engineering to wait for when it has become the founder of the West. Then Intel will have time for that, especially if AMD comes, hat in hand, asking for production wafers.

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

"while also claiming"

Look, I am excited by this possibility.

But China has form in claiming stunning breakthroughs that don't actually exist.

So, I'll wait for a product before hoping that it's real.

LockBit identity reveal a bigger letdown than Game of Thrones Season 8

"despite Cronos's claim to have destroyed every last server"

Yeah, but did they destroy every last backup ?

Google co-founder Brin named a defendant in wrongful death complaint

So, let me see if I get this

Uber-billionnaire wants a little plane to be delivered to his personal island, but can't be arsed to charter a boat that could do that securely.

Instead, in a very Agile move-fast-and-break-things, he agrees to a makeshift fuel bladder thingy that is not properly tested to "allow" the little plane to cover more than X times the distance its normal range allows. The untested contraption fails, two people die as a result.

Well, as much as I would like to blast Brin for being an aloof asshole (I'm sure he is one), I do think the fault kinda lies on the guys who didn't check that the ad-hoc installation worked perfectly before going on such a flight. Maybe do a San-Fransisco-to-New-York-and-back before venturing over the Great Blue Yonder, just to be sure ?

I totally sympathize with the bereaved, but billionnaire or not, I wouldn't pilot a plane over the unforgiving ocean without ensuring that all its components worked to perfection.

They didn't, and they paid the price.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Count me as a convert