Posts by Pascal Monett

Intel rakes in €515M from EU after ancient antitrust fine nixed

No longer, indeed.

I still uphold the ideal, but the eurocrats have ruined it.

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

Re: almost everything people do on their PC now works just fine under Linux

True.

But, aside from Linux users, who knows ?

Windows 11 stages a comeback – still miles behind older sibling

"difficult to buy a PC without AI silicon"

That doesn't mean that people will actually want to use said "AI" silicon.

Clippy was largely ignored. There's no reason, except the expectations of Redmond's Board, that people will flock to this new AI Clippy.

But hey, go on throwing money and resources at this abomination. Since when had Borkzilla ever learned from experience ?

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

"period costume with the knife and marlinspike"

Awesome.

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

886 cans of spam

Who knew that spam could be so devastating ?

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

Re: Sleepy Shores

Indeed.

Beancounters are not the ones to think of successful new products.

Meanwhile, "The board remains intensely focused ". Gosh, what a surprise. That bunch of suits needs to find someone that will give them their next quarter of share returns.

They don't give a flying one about the tens of thousands of people who are trying to work at their company . . .

Google to Iran: Yes, we see you using Gemini for phishing and scripting. We're onto you

So, AI is not a gamechanger ?

You might want to tune your violins properly.

On the one hand, you are touting your AI thingamajig as the best thing since sliced bread, and now you're saying that it is not that good.

Communication needs to be consistant.

What better place to inject OpenAI's o1 than Los Alamos national lab, right?

"protect the US power grid"

The only thing that will protect the US power grid is getting its network secured and off the general Internet.

Anything else is fluff and pseudo-AI is not going to help.

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

We are not alone

We can't be. The Hubble Deep Fields experiment proves that, whatever point in the sky you look at, there's a galaxy somewhere out there.

A galaxy. Millions upon millions of star systems. And we now know that most stars have planets.

There is life out there. It's just that there is a vanishingly small chance that we ever communicate with it, let alone meet it.

Microsoft signs eviction notice on Dev Home

Indeed.

Google has form in that area as well.

Spending watchdog blasts UK govt over sloth-like progress to shore up IT defenses

All those reports and they still can't get it right

It would seem that there is a wealth of knowledge about what is insufficient, and no drive to correct the issue.

I guess it's normal : civil servants are there to generate reports, not work, and ministers are certainly not there to stick their necks out and take risks (cf Yes Minister).

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

Pareille. Je viens de faire un tour chez Lucienne. Je lui ai posé trois questions et les réponses n'avaient rien à voir.

C'est censé être amusant de répondre à côté de la question ?

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

the Theosophical Society

. . has now met reality. And it bites.

An interesting article.

I will have no legacy to leave, I am but a mere business programmer. In the best case, in twenty years from now, someone will be tasked with reviewing some code and find my name in the author string.

I don't care. I have a loving wife and a daughter that adores me, and that is what is important to me.

If, however, I were an artist, I might have some issue with the legacy of my work. That said, if the Internet Archive is a Good Thing^(TM), apparently YouTube does a great job keeping artists' work alive, so all is not lost.

You probably have more CIO experience than the incoming White House CIO

So, blockchain and Palantir

Sounds like the perfect scum to fit in with this government.

US AI shares battered, bruised, and holding after yesterday's DeepSeek beating

"will obviously deliver much better models"

Yes, of course.

But you don't need $500 billion any more, now do you ?

Think harder.

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Not really, no.

It's like a sinkhole.

We're all wondering when it will drag us in.

SAP extends support deadline for getting off legacy software – in very special circumstances

"SAP has confirmed"

. . . that it will keep bilking its indentured slaves for as long as possible a little longer without completely disrupting their backend.

How nice.

Fear of the unknown keeps Broadcom's VMware herd captive. Don't be cowed

Nice argumentation

Except for the fact that there are at least two major companies that have already taken stock of the situation and given Broadcom the finger.

There will be more.

40 years ago, classified Shuttle mission foreshadowed Challenger's fatal flaw

Interesting point.

Goes to show that armchair engineers are about as useful as armchair generals.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Sorry, can't agree with you

The UI for any car is pretty simple : there's the steering wheel, blinkers, lights, gas pedal and brake. The rest is fluff.

Managing a computer, installing programs, managing disk data and folders, that is an entire other ball game.

I know a lot of people who can't manage sorting out their Inbox, for Pete's sake.

Mint FTW

I can't wait to get rid of Redmond's bloated mess, but that will have to wait until I'm retired.

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

"unforeseen technical complexities"

In other words, the people who were responsible for the specifications fucked up. That seems to be a regular occurence within UK government structures.

If you are designing a framework which is supposed to work country-wide, you can't content yourself with the opinions of old farts who don't know how things work. You need to gather the needs of the people who will actually work with the product and are expected to deliver something.

I have 30 years of experience in designing and implementing software products. I obviously start with the stuffy ole farts who declare what they think is what they need. Then I go talk to the people who actually do the job, and make sure that the final product responds to their needs.

The old farts won't know the difference anyway.

US freezes foreign aid, halting cybersecurity defense and policy funds for allies

Re: if it forces European leaders into self sufficiency

I don't like Trump and I don't trust his coterie of criminals in high positions in any way, but indeed, if this finally forces the Euromafia to do its job properly, then I'm for it.

Funds for cyberdefense ? Since when is the US responsible for cyberdefense in other countries ?

Oh, Cisco. Hmmm. Well, maybe a bit, then . . .

AI facial recognition could sink this murder probe

"Clearview doesn't want to come defend its technology in court"

Well that says it all, doesn't it ?

On top of that, who are these Keystone cops who take facial recognition from one video to accuse someone of a crime they had a record of on another video ?

They found a gun. Well duh, it's the USA. You can find a gun almost anywhere there. Would be a lot easier if guns were forbidden, eh ?

So, did the gun match the bullets ? Did it ? Because I believe we have actual reliable technology to determine that. And if it did, then screw this facial recog stuff, that guy is guilty.

But did the gun match the bullets ?

Google takes action after coder reports 'most sophisticated attack I've ever seen'

Interesting

Some truly up-to-date scum, there. Worth paying attention to.

As for passkeys, they're a brilliant idea until your device is stolen/broken.

Then what do you do to recover you account ?

A password is easy to replace. My biometric data, or the private key stored on the phone I just dropped into water, is not.

Citrix slated to axe its Technology Professional program

"the needs and priorities of our key customers"

Oh. So you don't consider all of your customers as key customers.

And you've just told them that to their face.

AI agents? Yes, let's automate all sorts of things that don't actually need it

"We know bad actors may try to misuse this technology."

But we're ready to make money off of that as well.

Tech stocks tank as US AI dominance no longer a sure bet

Re: Wishful ThinkingTM is not a good basis for policy

No, but apparently it's the only policy in use these days.

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Sieze it and scrap it

If it's a scrapheap, you'll at least get some metal out of it and it will be one less shadow ship that Putin can count on.

It's not like Malta is going to go to war.

Okay, nurse, I'll go take my dried frog pills . . .

AI chatbot startup founder, lawyer wife accused of ripping off investors in $60M fraud

"an enterprise-grade AI chat service"

What the hell is that ?

Something that only answers with quarterly result quotes ?

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

All this hoopla

And most actual Linux users are not going to rush to replace their keyboards anyway.

Re: Why all the animosity?

Well gosh. We're talking about another useless Borkzilla-imposed functionality that is extending its claws into penguinland.

Why are you surprised ?

Fitbit pays Uncle Sam $12M to sprint away from claims of burning-hot smartwatches

"the update failed to solve the problem"

Well duh. If you failed to design your gizmo in such a way as to avoid overheating, on something as basic as a watch, you're not going to be able to just throttle the CPU and hope it works (eh, Apple ?).

This watch was badly designed from the start and not properly tested.

So, business as usual.

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

That is still the case

Dear me

Do I know that kind of story.

I still have friends who call on me to help them with their PC woes. The latest tale is one who called me complaining that her Windows was excruciatingly slow. We chatted for a while and I came to the conclusion that I had to check things out for myself.

When she brought me the laptop, upon launching it I immediately saw that she had two different anti-virus products installed. When I asked her why, she answered : "but if I have two, I'm twice as protected".

If only.

I proceeded to uninstall one of them while explaining : "You hire two maids, but you only have one broom. They're going to fight over who gets the broom and, during that time, the cleaning doesn't get done."

VMware users gripe over 3-year commitment to renew licenses

Their largest customers are leaving in droves. They have the resources to do so and, apparently, they look at the invoice and say : No.

Broadcom will be left with the small fry, until another competitor eats its lunch.

Frankly, that's all it deserves.

Who is DDoSing you? Rivals, probably, or cheesed-off users

DDOS attacks are getting shorter ?

I thought the point was denial of service. Ten minutes max of denial is nothing. Borkzilla's Azure does hours, or even days at the drop of a hat.

Oh, and a disgruntled user ? So, somebody who goes on the Dark Web (because they're not advertising on Google, if I'm not mistaken), contacts some criminal hacker group and rents their service for ten minutes ?

Those hackers must be selling pretty cheap. On the other hand, they haven't bought the equipment they've hacked, so it likely doesn't cost them much.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

"rather than recognizing fundamental blockers"

Obviously. It doesn't "recognize" anything. It's a statistical analysis machine put to very exacting use.

To recognize a fundamental blocker, you need experience and intelligence. This pseudo-AI has neither.

Cognition AI has set itself a tall task, and the market is not going to stand for a 15% success rate.

LinkedIn accused of training AI on private messages

Why am I not surprised ?

I bailed from LinkedIn the day Borkzilla acquired them.

I was forced to have an account by a previous employer and, along the way, made contact with some people I appreciated so, when I left that employer, I kept the account for the sake of those contacts.

But then Borkzilla appeared and I decided that enough was enough, so I closed the account.

Now, I am very well aware that my account is still there, but there is nothing going on and I haven't accessed it since, so I Redmond wants to train pseudo-AI on whatever garbage is in there, it's welcome to it.

Apple sued for using dangerous 'forever chemicals' in Watch bands

Re: some limitations of the study

That may be true, but the lawsuit nails the fact that Apple knows about PFAS and has committed to phasing them out.

Looks like Apple didn't tell their supplier about that little detail.

Re: Lifetime guarantee

No it's YLMV - Your Lifetime May Vary.

Ransomware scum make it personal for Reg readers by impersonating tech support

Sangria Tempest or Carbon Spider

Could we stop giving those criminal groups sexy names ?

They're not hurricanes, they're scum.

So, call them Scum0001, Scum0002, etc.

They do not deserve more than that.

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

"not peer-reviewed work"

China regularly spurts out record claims in almost every domain, and many of them are either debunked or unverifiable.

If they really did this, it is a Good Thing^(TM), but until I hear reports of scientific confirmation, I'm going to refrain from congratulating them.

Meta, X sign up to Euro Commish code of conduct on hate speech

"platforms should respond in 1 day"

Looks like Musk is going to have to re-hire some moderators.

Is he going to have the time, given his new responsibilities in the US Government ?

Re: Hate speech - a truly Orwellian concept

I beg to differ.

If you advocate for violence against or the death of any specific group of people, you are using hate speech.

I can despise you and I have the right to say that (that is not, btw, the case). I cannot say that I want you hurt or dead.

Just like you can't yell "FIRE" in a theatre.

There are limits to free speech.

I totally agree with you there.

Self-control and being an adult. Add in common sense, and you have the perfect storm of what is lacking in adults today.

Got a telescope? Bid farewell to ESA's retiring Milky Way mapper

"three trillion observations"

Once again, stellar engineering and steadfast maintenance has brought back a wealth of information beyond all expectations.

Why can't Redmond have that level of excellence ?

Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall

Beancounters should never have been allowed in management positions.

They're there to count the beans, not to decide how to use them.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Universities are the absolute worst for shadow IT

Agreed.

From what I've read (here and elsewhere), universities are the absolute most dismal IT environments that exist. No budget, so-called "administrators" that have nothing but demands and no knowledge of the requirements, and no flexibility when it comes to finding solutions.

It's obviously a lot easier to shield oneself with a half-baked procedure document than actually think about how to make things work.

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

Yes, you're right. Scientifically, Einstein has never been proven wrong.

But that doesn't mean that we won't find a way.

I definitely hope that we find a way.