Posts by Pascal Monett

China is beating the world at scientific research, think tank finds

the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

Is this actually a PR group for China ?

They can't stop talking about China. Don't they have anything else to think about ?

Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s welcome

"unsure if Broadcom is a software company that will innovate, or a bunch of bankers.”

Oh, I know the answer to that : Broadcom is a bunch of bankers.

And they're banking wrong.

But it will take diminishing quarterly results for them to find it out . . .

SETI boldly looks beyond the Milky Way in latest alien hunt

Re: A large portion of the captured energy would be re-released as waste heat

You don't know that. You have no idea what technology they have. Maybe they have perfected room-temperature superconductors. Maybe they have some other technique.

You are drawing conclusions based on our level of tech. That is a mistake.

Feds claim sinister sysadmin locked up thousands of Windows workstations, demanded ransom

"now faces up to 35 years behind bars"

I hope he gets the full charge, and I hope he doesn't get out for good behavior.

You are an Admin. You have the moral duty to ensure the proper functioning of your company's network and the duty to ensure that all employees can do their job.

If you betray that trust and stoop to actually demand ransom for the accomplishment of your duty, you deserve to be shot - so be happy with whatever sentence your jury will hand you.

Brain Cipher claims attack on Olympic venue, promises 300 GB data leak

So, who still doesn't believe that crypto should be banned ?

DataVita declares sovereignty with 'National Cloud' for UK

"an alternative to the big cloud operators"

Oh, so you've found a way to not bill for auto-configured auto-scalable instances that were not part of the initial contract ?

And how are you going to make money then ?

Because The Cloud^TM makes all its money on those companies that didn't plan their needs properly . . .

Brit teachers are getting AI sidekicks to help with marking and lesson plans

"The UK government is set to equip teachers"

Oh, cool.

So UK Gov is going to fuck up education just like it fucked up health care.

Nice to know. A new trough for the corporate pigs. I wonder who got a new Mercedes out of this ?

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

"The overwhelming majority of these were completed successfully"

The overwhelming majority.

So let's imagine 99%.

That leaves 1% of 9.6 million which, if my maths is right, means a whopping 9600 cases where things went wrong.

Now, I understand that, in this day and age . . . wait a minute, what the fuck am I saying ? You had computers convert something to something else and you couldn't be arsed to do that reliably across 100% of your customer history ?

WHAT THE FUCK ARE COMPUTERS FOR ?!?

If you need a proper programmer to do things right, call me . . .

Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks

Now just a cotton-picking minute, there

"relying on a decades-old decision to exclude 50,000 satellites from environmental review defies common sense"

I'm sure it made perfect sense for the lobbyists who made it happen. Not to mention the companies who paid the lobbyists.

EU tries to pin down China on definition of 'important data'

"being happy to slurp up the data of other countries' people"

Oh, so just like the USA.

Nvidia's growth slows to a mere 122 percent but it’s still topping expectations

What ?

"most shipments associated with Singapore revenue were to locations other than Singapore and shipments to Singapore were insignificant"

Well then why post that revenue under Singapore ?

Is it because you were actually shipping to China when you're not supposed to ?

Google trains a GenAI model to simulate Doom's game engine in real-ish time

Ok, but why Doom ?

Solitaire wasn't sexy enough ?

Elon Musk reins in Grok AI bot to stop election misinformation

"largely touting its election tech as secure"

Um, I seem to remember quite a lot of discussions about how hacking one of those machines was easy-peasy.

That sounds like wishful thinking to me.

If only.

Warren Buffett’s favorite insurer GEICO drops VMware for OpenStack

Hey Broadcom !

Your cookie is starting to crumble.

You want big accounts and don't care about the small ones. Well Geico isn't a small account and you've lost it.

Your future is diminishing . . .

Proof-of-concept code released for zero-click critical IPv6 Windows hole

"bcdedit /set debug on"

Wait, am I supposed to help hackers by doing this ?

And if I don't, which will prevent from from reproducing the vuln, does that mean that a hacker wouldn't be able to either (meaning I'm actually secure) ?

I'm confused.

Microsoft hosts a security summit but no press, public allowed

Re: "Transparency"

Good point.

Public clouds are 'dirty' about VMware's on-prem push, says Broadcom CEO Hock Tan

"all you guys are very important to the cause"

All us guys have been against using someone else's server since the beginning of this cloudy nonsense.

You're late to the party, but any help is welcome.

CrowdStrike's meltdown didn't dent its market dominance … yet

"a costly and time consuming process"

Most probably, but that is not the important thing.

The important thing is : would it cost more to be once again shut down by CrowdStrike's carelessness ?

Boards all over are going to be looking carefully at that question, I'm sure.

Enterprise SAP users split between on-prem and cloud as migration challenges loom

"Private cloud [..] would not get the same innovations"

SAP : clouding itself into irrelevance.

Cloud is risk. And it's riskier than on-prem, given all the cloudy data hacks that have happened in the last year.

When you're on-prem, you may not know every little tidbit on how to defend your network, but apparently you're better off than depending on someone else's admin who may or may not answer your questions in the next 48 hours . . .

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

I agree with what you say, but it is a fact that making a new model that totally ignored compatibility with the previous model was a big mistake that cost a lot of companies their existence.

Of course, we know that today, but what could Commodore have become if it had stayed compatible with previous versions ? Would Microsoft even exist ?

Rocket Factory Augsburg breaks down the SaxaVord blowout

"Enjoy the footage"

That's what I like about rocket science. The people involved are generally very mature and intelligent, and they can admit failure without blushing.

Not like most high levels in banks or other private corporations who seek to cover up their failures at all costs . . .

Facebook whistleblower calls for transparency in social media, AI

Re: nobody ever dares interfere with big (domestic) websites

On that point, I really do think we should follow China's example and just throw Zuckerberg in jail for three months.

Methinks that might have a positive effect on the rest . . .

Big Tech: Malaysia won't let us set our own rules and that's not fair and makes us grumpy

"placing undue burdens on businesses"

You mean, preventing the Board from getting ever bigger bonuses because - <gasp> - they'll actually have to spend some peanuts for the content monkeys ?

How unfair !

Woman uses AirTags to nab alleged parcel-pinching scum

"police declined to pursue the matter"

How reassuring it must be to live in a country where the police can decide not to investigate a theft . . .

I wonder what their policy is on murder ? Never on a Monday ?

Chinese broadband satellites may be Beijing's flying spying censors, think tank warns

Oh look !

Another excuse to be afraid of China ! How wonderful !

I hadn't had a chance to terrorized by international news yet this week. Now that quota is filled.

Thank you so much, think tank !

The Windows Control Panel joins the ranks of the undead

Why migrate ?

Here's a novel idea, Redmond : why not put your commands in your shiny Settings turd, and leave the Control Panel alone ?

Silly me, Borkzilla is incapable of leaving well enough alone. If it works, it has to be tweaked until it doesn't anymore.

31.5M invoices, contracts, patient consent forms, and more exposed to the internet

"exposed to the public internet in a non-password protected database"

In this day and age, I call that criminal negligence.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Re: "usual black-and-white Gateway boxes"

Ah, power supplies.

Even today, when upgrading a PC I systematically search for a PSU that is at least 50% more powerful than the load I expect to have.

I have long since learned that, if a PSU is rated for 600W, it will give you 500W without too much trouble, in a pinch, for a while, but if you load it more, you will end up with a dead PSU sooner or later.

Yeah but no. There is a London, Texas, and you can bet that there is a number of US readers that just might be confused . . .

Lego's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

I'm happy you got through that trying episode.

And a Concorde is not a bad thing to remember it by . . .

Ex-Microsoft engineer resurrects PDP-11 from junkyard parts

You might consider his ego a bit less inflated if you realized that he is just a person who has had an insane and insanely successful career.

And he's far from being an idiot.

Maybe that's what's grating you ? He's just good.

CockroachDB scurries off to proprietary software land

CockroachDB

Yeah, it has cockroach in the name.

Should've guessed . . .

First of ESA's Cluster satellites prepares for fiery finale over South Pacific

"after an extraordinarily long mission"

I beg to differ.

Space missions have one of two outcomes : either they fail spectacularly before getting into orbit (or reaching their destination), or they successfully get to where they were supposed to go and then they outperform all expectations until they a) run out of fuel, or b) run out of energy.

It's only on good ol' Earth that projects fail all the time and get endlessly rescued (eh, UK Government IT ?).

Why ?

Because on Earth, you can send a peon you pay peanuts to do a minor (or even a major) repair, and it costs less than a Learjet trip over the Atlantic. Or maybe a Learjet, who's counting ?

But, to repair things in space, it costs at least a 737 Max.

And that is why we'll never have space-rated technology on Earth.

It costs too damn much.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Simon is the personnification of the Single Electron Administrator theory.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

And that is why Borkzilla definitely does not want anything to talk to Office300 if it can help it.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Electronics have certainly come a long way as far as durability under stress is concerned, but electromagnetism can still throw a monkey wrench into the workings from time to time. I wonder how a modern PC would resist in such conditions.

India delays planned space station and moon base by five years

Delayed by five years, eh ?

What's to bet we'll be hearing that song again ?

Open Compute Project seeks standard for concrete, with help from AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft

"a thoroughly worthy exercise"

Agreed. Anything we can do to lower our carbon emissions is a worthy goal, in my view.

As far as concrete is concerned, until we use it, we won't be able to be sure how it behaves. So every additional test is a Good Thing^TM.

China's rideshare champ Didi gives users the option to report stinky cars

Stinky cars ? In China ?

Count my gast flabbered.

Now I have one question : women being able to chose cars driven by women, is that not going to kind of end up making sure that women only drive cars of other women, and men are left with cars only driven by men ?

Yes, I know that men don't have the choice, but this is China. There will be so many women prioritizing their choice that men won't have much of a choice left.

Snowflake claims Iceberg wins table format wars, and Databricks has just proved it

“There's not really been any noticeable effect"

That is not entirely true.

SolarWinds left critical hardcoded credentials in its Web Help Desk product

SolarWinds ? Again ?

They just can't stay out of the limelight, now can they ?

Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it'll be back

That's why you need to add NoScript and UBlock Origin.

Then the web is fine.

Microsoft resurrects Windows Recall for upcoming preview

Re: Police, TLAs and border security must be salivating at the opportunity

Are you kidding ? Facebook is drowning them in its drool.

"something the company has striven to address"

Really ?

Adding Ai is not re-hiring a QC department, so I don't think so.

That said, the day Windows will be handled by AI is the day it might stop being so unreliable (as far as updates are concerned).

This uni thought it would be a good idea to do a phishing test with a fake Ebola scare

Brain ?

BRRAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNN !!

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

Re: the changes are almost entirely cosmetic

Of course.

Actually creating functionality requires capable programmers.

Changing the position of the latest gizmo can be handed to the intern . . and we often see the results !

3 years of updates ?

No !

You update that thing until there aren't any more on the market.

It's not a car, it's software. And even for cars, automakers are supposed to supply spare parts for more than a decade if I'm not mistaken.

So you can bloody well update your software for at least a decade.

This sell-and-forget civilization we're living in is really grating my nerves these days. Gotta refill my dried frog pills, I guess.

Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365

INPUT "DO YOU HAVE MONEY? " A$

Seems to be the basic interest of any multinational behemoth these days.

You don't ?

Get lost.

Microsoft to stop telling investors about peformance of server products

"eloquent statements of its performance"

Indeed.

With numbers like that, it's no wonder Redmond doesn't give a shit about a few pitty little bugs and zero-days, or downtime for that matter.