Posts by Pascal Monett

There are 10,000 reasons to doubt Oracle Cloud's security breach denial

So, when's the lawsuit ?

And will it be class action ?

Given the amount of data pilfered, I'm guessing a lot of CEOs are likely to be quite unhappy about this mess and will be wanting more than just excuses.

Accenture: DOGE's federal procurement review is hurting our sales

My heart bleeds for those poor, poor shareholders

I am so terribly sorry for those millionnaires who invested their "hard-earned" monies in a company headquartered in a tax haven who, apparently, might not be able buy a new Ferrari this month.

Ah, the humanity !

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Redundancy has a cost

Had there been a second substation built ten years years ago, I'll bet anything that four (or six) years ago somebody would have complained that it was useless and its maintenance costs would be cut.

And we'd be right here again today.

NASA (and ESA/JAXA/etc) are the only ones who understand the true utility of redundancy and who are ready to support the cost of it, because when your probe is a billion miles away, you'd better hope that you have a functional backup plan if something goes wrong.

Apple hallucinated Siri's future AI features, lawsuit claims

Re: Given this....

Agreed.

It is high time all this pseudo-AI bullshit got the downsizing it deserves.

Too many software supply chain defense bibles? Boffins distill advice

Bullshit

All of these are just excuses to continue downloading untested software to production servers.

You want to stop supply chain attacks ? Simple : have a copy of your production environment, download the new code there and test it. If you find a problem, don't move it over to the production version.

That used to be standard practice before the kids took over with the "move fast and break it" attitude.

It might be time to backpedal on that a bit.

Just sayin'.

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

Stop dreaming

If jumping ship to Linux or BSD was a business option, Borkzilla would already be dead.

Business is tied to Windows by the neck, the hands, the feet and the balls.

And Redmond knows it.

SAP legacy ERP customers still in no rush to adopt latest platform

"You have to have AI"

Really ? Why ?

Business has been functioning just fine up to now without any hallucinating pseudo-AI.

It would seem that business is going to continue functioning just fine without it.

It looks like IBM is cutting jobs again, with Classic Cloud hit hard

"Arvind Krishna has been very open about shifting labor focus to India"

Well duh, he was born over there.

I wonder what the outcry would be if a Chinese-born national got to the head of Boeing and starting shifting jobs to China. I've got the obscure feeling that the US Government would have an official reaction over that.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

"We lose money on the hardware"

I'm sorry, isn't there a law that says that such practices are illegal ?

You can sell at cost if you want, but you're not supposed to be allowed to sell below cost.

Why is the FTC not putting its nose in this ?

Trump fires Democrat FTC commissioners, presaging big tech policy shifts

Thank God the USA is a democracy

You know, with all the safeguards and laws to ensure that the proper procedures are respected ?

What's that ?

The President can dispense with procedures with a single signature ?

Wow. I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have thought of that.

Extortion crew threatened to inform Edward Snowden (?!) if victim didn't pay up

Re: Edward Snowden?

Yeah.

It's not like a message from Snowden would result in DEFCON 4 at the White House.

And that supposes that Snowden has access to the Internet from his comfy cell at the Kremlin.

Celonis slaps SAP with lawsuit claiming it's gatekeeping customer data

"28,000 different variations for the process of running a sales order"

No wonder SAP projects are never finished . . .

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Hasn't that been done already ?

Re: being lazy is part of his job

I'm a programmer. Project manager, senior developer, 25 years of experience in my specific domain.

And yes, I'm lazy as fuck. But that means that I'm going to test my code in every concievable configuration to ensure that it does its job right.

The lazy part comes after, when I just have to select the data set and push a button to get a report.

But before I let that button go into production, you can be sure that I have worked my ass off to make sure that it will respond properly to every concievable case.

But yeah, I'm lazy as fuck.

If I'm not mistaken, Watson was still of the "excpert system" generation, and did not use pseudo-hallucinating-AI.

The fact that Watson failed is because, well, it was IBM.

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

"earlier Chromecasts have a longer certificate validity, of 20 years rather than 10"

Okay, so why the deliberate decision to shorten the cert validity time ?

This thingamajig appears to be useful to many people. Did Google estimate that the newer version wouldn't last more than ten years, or what ?

Somebody made this decision conciously. I'd really like to know the reason.

As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

So, one question

Has Judge McCormick been fired by DOGE yet ?

Get off that old Firefox by Friday or you'll be sorry, says Moz

Re: Better yet: go Librewolf

Interesting news. I'll have to give it a try.

If it accepts NoScript and uBlock Origin, then it'll be a winner in my book.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

Remote Desktop

One of my top prioritites to disable on all of my home PCs.

They can rename it whatever they want, I'll disable it anyway.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

"why are admins slow to upgrade"

The real question is : why is it that the rule "always wait for version 1.02" is still valid ?

Because Borkzilla & Co push out "bright" ideas ideas without a clue as to what the consequences may be.

Admins, on the other hand, have to ensure that the business continues running because, if everything comes crashing to a halt, it's their ass on the line to get everything running again.

In that kind of situation, you get burned once and you've got the lesson.

Borkzilla, on the other hand, appears to never have learned any lesson.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

The only proper, professional way to do things is analyze the data and the requirements and set up a proper SQL database (no, not in Access) to handle the job.

Of course, it would seem that this approach is going to fall over at the analysis stage . . .

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

"he faces sentencing at a later date"

And he faces never getting a coding job ever again.

And that is well deserved.

Troubled French outsourcer Atos finds pot of gold at the end of UK state bank Rainbow

$612 million

I know that the readership of El Reg is primarily English-speaking, but we are talking about a French company, so it would have been nice to see the pounds and dollars converted into Euros.

$612 million is (following Wise's current exchange rate of 0.9209) equivalent to €563.59 million.

Just for the record.

Eutelsat in talks with Euro leaders as they mull Starlink replacement in Ukraine

"The US also reportedly paused offensive cyber operations against Russia"

Interesting.

Has Russia stopped offensive cyber ops against the US ?

Somehow I think not.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

"There is very little incremental utility"

It's interesting to contemplate the fact that His Muskiness is suddenly an expert on Science and a visionary when it comes to deciding what should be or not be done in space.

The ISS has invaluable utility and, if it does need to be replaced, it needs to be done in the most progressive way possible, preserving what exists and allowing for a new station to be built before decommissioning the old one.

Musk has a habit of throwing his toys out of the pram.

He is not qualified to decide on how Science should advance.

Unfortunately, he's got the position now, for a mere $250 million.

US minerals company says crooks broke into email and helped themselves to $500K

"investigate, contain, assess, and remediate"

A truckload of corporate bullshit to simply say : CORRECT.

But why use one word when you can spew a bunch of important-sounding ones ?

Microsoft Azure faceplants in Norway, taking government services with it

"Problems with Azure were confined to one region"

So, just a small number of users, then ?

Insiders say IBM's broader return-to-office plan hits older, more expensive staff hard

"[IBM] maintains that it does not systematically discriminate"

No, of course not.

Just every time it's laying people off.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

"those making decisions don't have to deal with the customers"

Obviously.

The drones that have to deal with customers are on the bottom rung of the ladder.

Those making decisions have cushy offices on the upper floor with a nice view.

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Agreed.

Black text on a white background for me, thank you.

DXC paid 50% more than original contract value for disastrous public sector Oracle project

50% more for doing less than 50% of the job

I wish I could invoice that kind of "performance".

A big AI build has ‘stalled’ and won’t happen this year as funds and GPUs prove elusive

The canary is choking

This might be the first sign that pseudo-AI is running out of gas.

Microsoft shows off novel quantum chip that can scale to 'a million qubits'. So far: Eight

"We have actually worked out a path to a million"

Congratulations.

That's just like saying you have mapped your way to the top of the Everest.

Now climb it, and I'll be impressed.

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

Re: "you won't be able to climb the ladder"

But that's the whole point, these days.

You're not supposed to climb that ladder. You're supposed to be the obedient Warlock, toiling tirelessly in the subterranean depths while the "elite" profit from the sunlight.

I'm starting to think that it's time for a new revolution, except that, when I see the result of the previous one, I'm wondering if it's worth it.

"Lloyds Technology Center in India"

And then they're going to moan about how there are no good techs in the UK . . .

Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market

Trifold - €3000

And I suppose you drive a Porsche as well . . .

These phone thingies are starting to get insane.

DeepSeek disappears from South Korean app stores over privacy concerns

Wait a minute

Didn't DeepSeek just demonstrate that you didn't need 100,000 GPUs to get a viable result ?

Shouldn't those grandiose plans be revised, or are the administrative busybodies too chuffed with the idea that they are going to be at the basis of a ridiculously expensive project to notice that they are already obsolete ?

Avaya hangs up on users with fewer than 200 SaaSy contact center seats

"orchestrate seamless customer journeys”

There's nothing more seamless than being told that you have to pay more for the same service . . .

Avaya is obviously getting too big for its own boots.

It is high time that companies stop dictating to their customers - but that won't ever happen.

Indian authorities seize loot from collapsed BitConnect crypto scam

I would love to bury them in a landfill, public or not.

The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux

Electricity ? Who's talking about electricity ?

It'll be QUANTUM.

Quantum solves everything, right ?

Why AI benchmarks suck

"They identify nine general problems with benchmarks"

There is, in general, only one problem with benchmarks : they're published by the same people who want to sell you something.

The only reliable benchmark is the one made by someone who has no skin in the matter, who is entirely devoted to actual results and who doesn't have any shares in the company.

That is a rare gem, these days.

UK's new thinking on AI: Unless it's causing serious bother, you can crack on

Knowledge should be free, I agree.

Data is not knowledge.

Don't confuse the two.

Users await the fine print on SAP Business Suite reboot

Re: Real customer focus there at SAP

Standard Marketing Procedure. You always boast about anything "new" as being great, even if it took you 10 years to get there.

Especially for SAP, which is apparently desperate to move its slaves customers to The Cloud^TM, even though there is no benefit for anyone but SAP.

Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself

Attribution pixels

How is it that this shit hasn't been outlawed already ?

The one pixel thingy that spies on you is as old the Internet now, and everyone knows about it.

Block it. Stop it. And sue the companies that use it.

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

"attorneys [..] have apologized [..] for submitting documents that cite non-existent legal cases"

You don't get to apologize. Not for the price you charge, nor for the responsibility you are supposed to uphold.

You get disbarred.

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Holy fucking stupid idiot

Your customers are not your private shopping center.

Dean was a very, very nice guy.

I would not have fudged the problem, I would have called my manager and escalated, and if Colin got fired (or worse), too bad for him.

You're a professional. Act professional.

I can cover someone having made a mistake. God knows I've made my share.

But stealing ? I draw the line there. You're done.

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

Rust burnout, blah blah, whatever

I am not following the issue in any way, but I am sure of one thing : before you criticize someone, you need to be sure that you have the authority to do so.

Linus Torvalds has his faults, like everyone, but he has been exemplary in building a revolutionary open source OS and in managing its maintainance.

So, before you go mouthing off about how you don't appreciate how you've been treated, how's about you build something as significant and try to maintain it ?

Then you might see how difficult it is.

HPE says blocking Juniper buy is a sure Huawei to ensure China and Cisco thrive

"an assertion that blocking the deal will benefit Huawei"

OMG, we can't let Hauwei win ! We must do something to . . . uh . . stop that ! ASAP !

Yeah, sure.

Insurance giant finds claims rep that gives a damn (it's AI)

"The claims agent still looks at them just to make sure they're accurate"

Yeah, sure.

They put them on screen and wait a second before validating, but I'll be damned if they really take any time to check anything.

After all, it's written by AI, right ? If they change anything, then it's their fault.

WordPress war latest: Ploy to trademark Hosted WordPress, Managed WordPress derailed

"because an examining attorney determined they don't qualify as trademarks"

Okay, question : was there an examining attorney because that is SOP, or was it because somebody complained about the whole thing ?

Because, from where I sit, the USPTO feels like a rubber stamp for any demand and I have a hard time believing that they actually examine anything before granting a trademark.