Posts by Pascal Monett

AT&T claims VMware by Broadcom offered it a 1,050 percent price rise

Congratulations, Broadcom

If your objective is to price yourselves out of the market, you're doing a great job.

Watch your mirrors: Tesla Cybertrucks have 'Full' 'Self Driving' now

"sudden, dramatic and dangerous"

Those are not adjectives that I would like to describe my driving experience.

I'll keep my ICE car until the industry delivers to me a car that doesn't have a steering wheel, where I can just give the destination and take a nap, or read a book.

Until then, as long as I am responsible, I'm the one driving, thank you.

Epic Games starts Battle Royale with Samsung, Google over app store practices

Wait a minute

“This is a meritless lawsuit. Android device makers are free to take their own steps to keep their users safe and secure”

Hold on, Google. Aren't you the same company that lost in court to Epic's claim that you were garden-walling your app store to ensure insane revenue ?

And now, because you lost, you are saying that phone makers are free ?

I note that you did not say that phone makers can accept any app store. No. You just said they're free to ensure their user's safety.

Somehow, I feel that that is a strawman argument.

Imagine a government that told Big Tech to improve resilience – then punished failures

Imagine that

A government that actually wants things to improve and is not shy of making the laws to ensure it happens.

My, I can't recall the last time I had a government like that . . .

Oracle settles customer NetSuite dispute out of court

So, Oracle can once again claim it admits no wrongdoing

I did nothing wrong, see ? The complainant drowned in the river in an unfortunate accident, so I did nothing wrong . . .

America. The best justice a company can buy.

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

"These previews are released early to" . .

. . ensure that users can beta test it and report on the issues.

Because Redmond doesn't test anymore. Why should it ? It's reputation doesn't seem to suffer no matter how many times it fucks up.

And my God does it fuck up.

Don't forget : Borkzilla has (had) Apple shares.

Cupertino has been infected . . .

Brazilian court sprays Musk's X with more fines for returning after ban

And that is what is going to bury him

"The investor Fidelity was recently reported to have cut the valuation of its stake in X to $4.19 million, down from the $19.66 million it had initially invested"

So, from 20 to 4. A fivefold reduction.

He's already pissed off advertisers (and whined about it), but pissing off investors is going to hurt a lot more in the long run. Not only because X is going to have trouble finding more money, but investors of the caliber of Fidelity are going to think twice, nay thrice, before investing in any other project he might dream up.

By the way, Elon, how's that Hyperloop going ?

Cloud threats have execs the most freaked out because they're not prepared

"business leaders who have regulatory and legal requirements to improve security do just that"

And once again, the old song about capitalism regulating itself flies out the window.

I have trouble believing that, in this day and age, there are still utter morons who prefer to wait for a catastrophe to do something about the security of their IT infrastructure.

Today, as soon as you are connected to the Internet, you are a possible target for a legion of very savvy, dedicated miscreants who would like nothing more than to bring your company to its knees in exchange for money. And then more money. And the bigger the company, the bigger the target.

If that's not enough to get your finger out and start securing your network, then you deserve the cost that is coming to you.

Forget the Kia Boyz: Crooks could hijack your car with just a smartphone

My answer is keep that car running, the one you bought in 2010 (or before).

China calls for realtime censorship of satellite broadband

I wish China good luck

Now that we have Starlink, like it or not, I wish China good luck in getting its firewall on there.

It is now possible, maybe, for a Chinese citizen to have a direct link to the world without Beijing's oversight. And there will be more constellations that China will not control.

The door is opening, Xi. You're going to have to deal with that some day.

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

"that took a lot of courage for Curt to confess"

Yes, I do believe it did and I think that is a good sign.

I hope that what he learned from this whole debacle is that you simply do not pick on women thinking it's funny.

Curt was clearly an asshole. Maybe he grew up a bit after that.

US Army orders next-gen robot mule to haul a literal ton of gear

How is this better than a truck ?

It's got eight weels, it's certainly not electric, why not just use a truck ?

What is the point ?

Apple ropes off at least 4 GB of iPhone storage to house AI

Whatever you assume is your problem.

"about the size of an HD movie, for now"

Nope.

I have more than a thousand HD movies in MP4 format and the vast majority of them are less than 2.5GB in size.

It depends on the efficiency of your compression algorythm.

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

"Microsoft [..] insists that the self-surveillance system is secure"

Please excuse me if that insistance doesn't really impress me one bit.

BOFH: AI consultant rapidly transitioned to new role as automotive surface consultant

Re: Human-fired power station

Yes, well with types like Zuckerberg, it's pretty obvious.

IBM and Oracle to support 280,000 users after winning mega ERP govt tech contract

Oracle, seems I've heard that name before

Oh, right, I've heard of it in the £2B ballsup at the perennially failing Europe's biggest council.

And yet they get another £700 million (which, as we all know, will balloon to over a billion) to play with.

If I screw up at a customer site, they'll never invite me over again, let alone sign over a paltry €70K.

Too big to fail, hmm ?

Data harvesting superapp admits it struggled to wield data – until it built an LLM

40TB a day

If I'm not mistaken, that's over a petabyte of storage needed par month. The biggest HDDs you can get is apparently 16TB, so that's 3 disks a day, 21 per week. I hope they get a good price, because otherwise it's a budget that can reach over €5000 per week.

I checked SSD prices and capacity, but that would be insanely expensive at such a volume.

I'd like to see that storage room.

SAP support auto-renewal gotcha: Do nothing now, pay for another year

"I think it'll probably be around 3 percent"

Ah, the comfort of having your customers by the balls and being able to arbitrarily augment your invoices for no good reason . . .

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

"an assault on the presumption of innocence"

There is no presumption of innocence any more.

You are presumed guilty unless you prove the contrary.

Apple quietly removed 60 more VPNs from Russian app store, researchers claim

"We demand that Apple uphold its commitment to human rights"

No, no. You don't get it. Apple is committed to human rights as long as it doesn't harm its bottom line.

There is no company that will actively go against a dictatorship. Apple is in China, right ? What more proof do you need ?

Money is everything to The Board. If slavery was still acceptable, you can be sure that Apple would have slave drivers.

And they wouldn't be alone.

Uncle Sam accuses Aussie AI startup boss of financial fakery that duped investors

For all the good that will do him.

I'm guessing that India will be fine with shipping his ass to the Feds.

I would.

India extends IT hardware import license scheme that enraged Big Tech

"import license scheme that enraged Big Tech"

Their country, their rules.

You don't like it ? Don't deal there.

You want the money ? Shut up and put up.

You're only a multi-billion dollar company. You don't actually make the rules.

Especially outside of the USA.

WordPress.org denies service to WP Engine, potentially putting sites at risk

I don't get it

Wordpress relies on 3rd-party extensions, and now it's attacking a 3rd-party for what ? Making its product more useful ?

Either you allow 3rd party extensions or you don't. You don't go schizophrenic about it.

OpenAI to reveal secret training data in copyright case – for lawyers' eyes only

"its use of copyrighted content qualifies as fair use"

Of course. Since OpenAI is a company, it obviously will define its actions on the best legal basis possible. No company actually does things it thinks are illegal. They all take the shady to the limit.

The tribunal is there to find out if OpenAI is right.

Unions 2, Apple 0: Cupertino caves after fresh strike threat

"We know Apple is capable of providing us with the pay and benefits we deserve"

Oh it definitely is. Apple is one of, if not the richest company in the world. It is definitely capable of providing, it's just that the Board prefers providing for the shareholders.

91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship

Re: not again

What are you doing here then ?

If your AI does the crime, you'll do the time, warns DoJ

Good

Since actual AI does not exist, making sure companies are responsible for whatever their statistical analysis machine spews is a good decision.

ESA spending €17M on spacecraft just to watch it go up in flames

"so engineers can see what happens"

If that's what needs to be done, so be it.

We're not talking Redmond programmers. We're talking space science.

Go for it.

Hyperscalers are carving up the ocean floor into private internet highways

No kidding

"large tech companies 'enjoy a remarkable degree of freedom from regulation and accountability for their activities and the content they carry' "

Yup. And, in my opinion, it's because the Internet has never been considered as something important by governments across the world.

But that is changing. All you need to do is look at how many governments have officials with their personal social media page when they should be talking through official government channels. Or look at how many governments actively control, at sometimes forbid, Internet activity. Oh sure, the ones that do that now cannot be counted as democracies, but the day is coming when Internet regulations will be decided upon and enforced.

Fujitsu wins spot on £600M framework after vowing to sit out public sector

Words are nothing but words

Acts count.

And $600 million is obviously not something a company is going to ignore.

So good on Fujitsu for having once again put its snout into the trough. Bad on UK government officials for allowing that.

Oh well, it's just pissing another $600 million into the wind. It's not like that has any consequence, right ?

NASA, IBM just open sourced an AI climate model so you can fine-tune your own

"a relatively small cluster of 64 Nvidia A100s"

So now you can have your own weather forcast for, what, only 6 A100s ? At $8,000+ a piece ?

Or you might choose to rent them on a cloud platform for only $2 per hour.

A bargain, I say !

India funds Moon lander, space station module, and Venus orbiter

I wish them luck

India is to build a new space station ? Wow.

If they manage to get that done and in orbit, that will be a major achievement.

Go India !

Cloudflare tightens screws on site-gobbling AI bots

Indeed. Here's the deal : fuck off.

Admins using Windows Server Update Services up in arms as Microsoft deprecates feature

Yay

Once again, Borkzilla is the best advocate of moving to Linux that there is.

AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that

"move Windows beyond its version-based desktop obsession"

Borkzilla is heading for a wall of its own making.

It promised that Windows 1 0 would be the last ever version, and now it has proven that you can't trust its words.

Nobody cares about upgrading a PC that is still working satisfactorily. 5 year old equipment is good for the trash ? I don't think so. Come back in six years and we'll talk about that again.

Face it : the least capable, lowest-cost laptop is fine for surfing the Web and doing mail. Companies have equipment that is much more powerful and will last a decade or more.

The renewal treadmill is over, Borkzilla. Deal with it.

Intel has officially entered the grin and bear it phase of its recovery

As usual, long-term thinking is not in the MBA mindset

Yes, building a foundry is costly. Yes, it will take years, maybe a decade before said foundry actually makes a return on investment.

Guess what ?

Some things take time to be realized and, if you can't wait, you won't reap the benefits.

Too bad for you.

Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal

"the Sun is expected to swallow our planet"

The discussion is still open on that point. Maybe when the Sun goes into its red giant phase it will indeed swallow our planet, or maybe the Earth's orbit will have changed because the Sun's gravitational pull will have weakened.

Either way, Humanity will have to have evacuated long before, or it will already be extinct and the fate of Planet Earth will no longer be a problem.

Re: Sending one out into space.

The enemy hardly needs biological weapons. A space-faring civilization capable of spanning the mind-boggling distances between stars will just chuck a 20km-wide asteroid at our planet and wait two (twenty ?) years for the fallout to wipe eveything out.

Then they can colonize and mine our planet for whatever it is they think they're looking for, or just use the planet as another host for their ever-growing population.

Microsoft cash to help reignite Three Mile Island atomic plant

Re: Clippy

That was funny :)

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

Remote Desktop

The one thing that should definitely be disabled by default. Those who know what they're doing doing can enable it if needed.

Europe's largest city council: Oracle ERP allocated £2B in transactions to wrong year

Oh look

An update on a complete failure of management.

Just what I needed to make me feel good on a Friday evening.

Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after

"Shifting to Teams"

Seems like that is the start of a mountain of problems . . .

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: not an inappropriate insult

No, it's just abysmally stupid when you're not the one deciding who gets fired tomorrow.

But hey, if you don't have the Darwinian credentials to understand that, then get fired at your convenience.

What the ever-loving **** ?

"he loudly asked the boss if he was still having an affair with a colleague – in front of the entire office and the boss's wife"

Okay, how is it that this guy wasn't fired the next day ?

A huge week for satnav as both China and Europe make generational launches

At least that won't hog LEO

This stuff is going GEO, and it will be useful for a long time, not just five years.

Citrix adds remote Mac support, but some customers are grumpy

"a general lack of client empathy during negotiations"

Empathy ?

That's for runner-up losers that don't have a market monopoly. We do, so you accept our product and you're happy to kiss our feet.

Because, seriously, where else are you going to go ?

Alibaba Cloud claims its modular datacenter architecture shrinks build times by 50 percent

Alibaba Cloud

In this day and age, what Western company would be insane enough to go and deliberately put its information into the hands of Mordor Beijing ?

CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains

I must agree with you. The answer to the question "Why does software require so many urgent patches?" is that the security landscape is continually changing.

Okay, that does not give a free pass to not sanitizing inputs - that should be punishable by a dozen lashings - but you can build a product with care and attention, making sure to protect against all known vulnerabilities, and then bam! A month later, a new type of vulnerability appears and you have to correct for it by patching.

That is the truth, but it should not hide the lazy programming many products are guilty of.