Posts by Pascal Monett

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

Re: No surprise there then

To be fair, my 2007 Audi has an issue with the passenger door handle and I'm looking at a quote for €400+.

On the other hand, it is a 2007 Audi, not a much more recent Tesla.

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

Re: I use a paid version of Office 2013

Because it's not your computer anymore, it's Nadella's and he'll do as he pleases with it.

Re: Its because

You only wasted a single day in your life ?

You lucky bastard.

Re: ot hiding your post behind the AC handle

That is not an impediment for me.

Re: Wonder what happens when its run on a Linux box?

If you have managed to get Windows Update to run on a Linux box you are one sick puppy.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Agreed, but they're not the only ones. How's about 22.01.2023 ? Or 2023-22-01 ?

And I have a few more that I found while importing CSV files from various customers - sometimes with different formats inside the same file.

I swear, it's a good thing firearms aren't easily availble 'round here because when I snap I'll be reduced to strangling the bastards instead of shooting them - that'll give someone more time to drag me off.

No to cups or spoons

Especially in cooking, you state the ingredients in grams or milliliters and that should be all.

Spoons, really. What size spoon do you ? And don't tell they're all the same size, that's simply not true. The spoons from our wedding tableware are bigger than the spoons of our daily tableware, so there is no standard there.

Re: terrified by the very concept of metric

Yes, I understand.

Cavemen were terrified by fire as well.

So, not to worry. In a few millennia they will grow bigger brains and be able to comprehend the system. In the meantime, they'll be happy measuring in smelly feet.

Miscreants sure do love ransacking cloud networks, more so than before

Well duh

"As enterprises around the world continue to move to the cloud, cybercriminals are following right behind them"

Pro tip : they want to get to the data. You put the data into The Cloud^TM, they attack The Cloud^TM.

Not rocket science and eminently foreseeable.

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

Do you add a dollar to the price of your pint ?

Finally, ransomware victims are refusing to pay up

Estimate-only

Fine. Let's hope it's a real step in the right direction.

LUMI supercomputer puts GPU partition through its paces with hardcore science

That is insane

"pilot projects covering solar atmospheric modelling, natural language processing (NLP) and imaging of seismic data"

Are you saying that natural language processing is as difficult as modeling the interactions of the most powerful open-air nuclear furnace of our entire Solar System ?

Nuts.

Ransomware severs 1,000 ships from on-shore servers

"if it planned to pay them"

The answer should be NO.

The only reason these attacks continue are because these assholes are getting paid. Stop paying and the problem goes away.

Yes, your company might fold in the meantime. It's called the Greater Good.

And, next time, train your personnel better.

Intel angles for more subsidies to build German mega-fab

"it will build once 'funding' worked out"

No problem, Intel. How much money do you have in the bank ?

It would be interesting to see how companies would react if they had to fork over a share of the profits based on how much subsidies they were offered.

Like : "Okay, you say it will cost $10 billion to build this plant. We can offer you $7.5 billion. Then you will pay us 75% of revenue over ten years."

Of course, that scenario only works if every government does the same. Might as well wait for pigs to fly.

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

"Microsoft will lay off 10,000 people"

And a Happy New Year to you too !

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

Explanation : if they don't like it here, they can go get stuffed in China.

I'm sure they'll appreciate the difference.

Boo hoo

"the threat of criminal prosecutions could deter investment and drive companies to leave the country"

Go run while you can. Sooner or later, every decent country will have such rules, at which point you'll be forced to be hosted in some island haven that will be blocked, so good luck serving your wares to the few who live on the same island.

I am sick of seeing major companies get barely a slap on the wrist when they don't respect the rules, then threaten to up and leave when the rules get tightened.

Go host yourselves in China. Ask Ma what he thinks about that.

Brit civil service claims there's enough money for mammoth ERP refresh project

ERP. Again.

Didn't we just leave this party ?

Also : isn't it astonishing that the civil service suddenly has £300 million lying around for this ?

Oh, silly me. Sir Humphry's cousin thrice removed hasn't yet had a chance to partake of the trough. Happy snouting !

Artificial pancreas successful in type 2 diabetes tests

Re: To be honest

I wish you the best of luck. Diabetes is a pain because, although it is not painful in itself (as far as I know), it can kill you pretty quick.

In any case, I think this artificial pancreas has a great future in store and I hope it will help everyone afflicted with this condition.

Oh, WoW: Chinese gamers to be cut off from Blizzard games next week

Re: Cause and effect...

It's called business.

You say you don't want to work with me any more ? Excuse me while I search for people who do.

And the childish sexual insults simply demonstrate that NetEase's management need to grow up. Petulant children should not be in charge of major communications companies.

Eh, Musk ?

Crypto exchanges freeze accounts tied to North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group

Re: Growing Up?

The problem isn't really in decentralization per se, but rather with the fact that any Joe Schmo can declare himself part of the infrastructure without having to prove that he knows what he's doing (he doesn't).

Twitter starts auction to flip the bird, furniture, pizza ovens, gadgets galore

"Musk has [..] articulated a plan"

Well he can still articulate.

Delivering will be exponentially more difficult given that he has fired or driven away most of the developers.

I wonder how his "search" for a new CEO is going ? I especially wonder what difference it would make to Twitter's image, given that everyone knows that said CEO will not be able to manage any differently than what His Muskiness accepts, so booting out the racists again is clearly off the table.

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

"perhaps best not to use a program called SETI@Home somewhere other than, you know, home"

I disagree, somewhat.

The mistake was in implementing the plan on his own. What he should have done would be to present the idea to his manager and get approval.

Of course, that meant his idea could also have been shot down, but hey, them's the breaks.

Disclaimer : I was a long-time contributor to SETI@Home myself, and ran it on every computer I had at home, plus my work laptop if I could.

China aims to grow local infosec industry by 30 percent a year, to $22 billion by 2025

"an ambitious program to scale the industry at 30 percent compound annual growth rate"

Yes, because in security nothing says success like an arbitrary financial goal.

Oh, and blockchain ?

Guys, if you actually manage to implement blockchain successfully where security is concerned, that will indeed be an achievement.

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

"Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute"

No it didn't.

$760K out of $3+ million is definitely not most of that spend.

Now, 8 petabytes of data is nothing to sneeze at, that's for sure. But, if you have a budget of over $260K/month, you have enough money for servers, a local SAS implementation running over 100Gbps fiber and money to spare for the aircon bill and fire suppressing installation.

Apparently, The Cloud^TM does not give you any savings on the IT personnel budget, since there is still need of a bunch of skilled admins to oversee it properly, so you have the people required to manage all that locally.

I'm curious to see next year's local bill and find out just how damning it is for The Cloud^TM.

NSA asks Congress to let it get on with that warrantless data harvesting, again

"he provided several stories"

Oh good. Violating the privacy of 300+ million individuals on a daily basis gave you less than a dozen useful cases.

That declaration in itself would be enough for me to tell them to take a hike. Then I'd go and create an even more restrictive law.

Plus : this is about spying on Americans, and the NSA is the one deciding what it can tell ?

Sorry buddy, you are talking to the elected representatives of your own country about your activity concerning your own citizens. You spill all the beans, or you go to jail.

Simples.

Russians say they can grab software from Intel again

Warranty obligations ?

You only have those when you risk being sued.

I don't see that Russian citizens or corporations are in a position to sue anybody outside of Russia - although that might be a brilliant excuse for getting out of the country at this time.

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

The meltdown continues

Clumsy bull in China shop keeps breaking things. Soon will get angry because of all the broken pieces lying on the floor.

The only question remaining is : when will the fire start ?

Apple just cut Tim Cook's pay by 40%. How ever will he get by on that $50m?

Re: Christians have been trying

Not sure they've been trying that hard. After all, the Vatican is one of the richest places on the planet.

And the Catholic church has historically had dissentions in its ranks about the wealth of cardinals and such.

So it's more a case of "do as I say as not as I do" when the church is talking about Jesus being poor.

That is not, however, an excuse for paying one guy enough money per year to support 10,000 families. He's not doing the work of that many people.

Sure, his work is important and it is important that he know what to say, when and how to say it and to who. Those things are complicated and require an above-average intelligence, to be sure. But they're not worth $50 million a year - especially when that is on top of all the other stuff he gets.

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

I never said people don't imagine things, on the contrary.

What I'm saying is that, nine times out of ten, people imagine wrong.

And apparently you agree.

"They even asked for a physical description of the caller"

A physical description.

From a phone call.

There is no way anyone can infer anything physical from a voice over radio or phone. I cannot begin to count the times have I heard someone's voice on the radio, only to be shocked when I found a pic or a YouTube video featuring that person.

Some people sound younger than they are, some sound much more mature, and being fat or not is not something you can detect by voice alone (let's not even mention height).

Most of the time, the one and only physical trait you can possibly derive just by voice is whether that person is male or female (and even then, it can be tricky).

Short answer : that was a stupid question.

Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid

Re: Two things

Well, she's going to have a lot of time for doing nothing now . . .

Slacker got caught. No sympathy here.

Amazon's attempt to crush New York union slapped down

Re: undue influence?

Or actually coming to discuss things with the employees and outlining their rights.

The cheek !

HPE to face lawsuit for allegedly misleading DXC investors

Business as usual then

"it instead proceeded to lay off many of the company’s most experienced and highly paid employees in order to make cost savings, inflate its apparent financial performance and boost its stock price"

Sounds like standard operating procedure to me, eh IBM ?

Ex-Twitter Brits launch legal challenge against dismissal

"a collective consultation redundancy process currently under way isn't conforming to British law"

Musk's reaction : "Law ? What is this 'law' thing you speak of ?".

BOFH: It's 4ft tall, heavyset, has optional fax. No they didn't take the toner!

Great start to the year

BOFH and workplace accidents. Mmmm.

But seriously, the insurance premiums for that company should be bankrupting it by now.

Intel offers desktop chip that can hit 6GHz if everything goes right, you can keep it cool, stars align, pigs fly

"that test was running the 7zip benchmark"

Oh come on Intel, the 7zip benchmark ?

Are you that scared that your tech won't work ?

Run the Crysis demo, for Pete's sake, and show us that your chip doesn't melt and keeps the game chugging. That would be meaningful.

NASA overspent $15m on Oracle software because it was afraid an audit could cost more

IIRC, NASA doesn't have a single F35 on it's roster of flight vehicles.

Twitter's Singapore landlord says avian network still a tenant, despite eviction reports

One more step towards oblivion

I'm starting to feel like it will almost be sad when Twitter dies for good. Almost. So many jokes that won't be made anymore . . .

Because that is where Musk is going with Twitter : to the chopping block.

And once Twitter is dead, we can finally stop hearing about how that twat is such a genius.

His management sucks (surprise, surprise).

Microsoft fumbles zero trust upgrade for some Asian customers

"Double-byte characters [are found in] Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese"

And Borkzilla is staffed by pure, red-blooded American programmers who only know about the issue by looking at (gasp!) a manual.

No surprise there.

Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

Re: reducing the crew cost of operating the plane

On paper, yeah. So, for the beancounters, as usual.

How do you tell the autopilot that there's a crosswind ?

And how does it manage windshear ?

Cisco warns it won't fix critical flaw in small business routers despite known exploit

Re: Customer concern ?

That is soooo last millenium.

These days megacorps don't even need to pretend any more. It's just "fork it over and thank your lucky stars you don't live in China".

Games Workshop once again battles scariest monster of all: ERP gone wrong

Re: The Horror

I'm waiting for someone to point out something that is "better".

Not holding my breath though.

That said, a tabletop game company needs an ERP system ?

Really ?

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

I wish them well

Got the 32 and 64 torrents in place, will be seeding.

Government tech spending in England more than doubles in five years

"the non-digital leader can't really understand"

The non-digital leader needs to put his/her ego in a box and accept that not understanding is not an excuse for not taking the opinion into account.

In other words : shut your mouth and do as he says.

Can we get a cluebat icon ?

New software sells new hardware – but a threat to that symbiosis is coming

"get just a few new features, but peace of mind"

Peace of mind with Borkzilla updates ?

I don't think so.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

"will reveal the actual price only once the tool becomes generally available"

So, they're already lying through their teeth ?

Not only is Borkzilla not including the features that people want and need (aka good performance and no headaches), but it can't be arsed to lay down the rules transparently.

I thank my lucky stars that I don't need to use this shite on a daily basis.

Swiss Army's Threema messaging app was full of holes – at least seven

"infested with bugs – possibly for a long time"

I think it is time for governments and government institutions to realize that it is not because they say it's secure that it is.

Neither is it secure because whoever they contracted to do the job said it is.

And it's especially not secure simply because the contract said it had to be.

It's not secure until a proper security research firm has confirmed that it's secure.

Salesforce: There's no more Slack left to cut

"I take responsibility for that"

And the consequence will be ?

Are you going to step down ? I doubt it. Are you going to slash your bonuses ? Don't be silly.

Oh, I know : you'll skip your first coffee of the morning.

Yeah, that'll about do it.

Sourcehut to shun Google's Go Module Mirror over greed

"2,500 times per hour"

That is 2494 times too many.

Any sane code should control how long it's been since it downloaded that specific data block. If less than 10 minutes, there's absolutely no reason to automatically query it again.

Manually, you do what you want, but automatically you tone it down.

The Internet does not belong to your code.