Posts by Pascal Monett

'Wobbly spacetime' is latest stab at unifying physics

So, physics goes wibbly-wobbly

Nothing like a stiff drink to sooth the nerves, right ?

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Ah, politicians

They operate on the good old "something must be done" principle (this is something, so it must be done).

Granted, since the past three decades it appears to me that, globally speaking, politicians everywhere are getting more and more shallow and stupid (the shitshow we've got going in France is appalling), if not outright callous and thieving, but the real problem, IMO, is that they all feel that they must appear to be achieving, and they will grasp at anything to do so.

They haven't understood that their job is not to achieve, it is to manage. Achieving is done by the voters, they have a job (hopefully, at least), and jobs are what achieve things.

Politicians (and administrative busybodies in general) are simply there to make sure the rules keep everyone globally going in the same direction. And maybe, from time to time, inaugurate a monument.

"facial age estimation"

Oh, the paragon of truthfulness. Yes, I am eagerly waiting for the AI that can identify the age of a person by only analyzing a portrait. I'm sure all the Asians will be either miffed or delighted (following if they're actually under 30 or over 40) at such a "proof" of age. I personally know a woman of Chinese ancestry who is going to celebrate her 40th birthday soon. Going by her face, I would swear she's still in her 20s.

So yeah, I'm really interested in seeing a program that can accurately judge a person's age by only their picture.

I won't be holding my breath, though.

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

A strikingly important article

The subject of our memories is a very important one, and we're nowhere near a proper solution.

I agree that file storage works, but file retrieval is indeed a thorny subject - made worse when the storage medium differs the older the file date.

I also have a collection of DVDs, HDDs and now BluRay discs that I store my digital life on. When VHS went out of style, I used my living room DVD player with hard drive to convert from VHS to MP4 and voilà, all those files went to DVD storage (and are now also backed up on BluRay). What happens when switch to crystal cubes with yottabytes of storage ? I'll be copying all of that to the cube, of course.

And then what ? My data organization isn't terrible, but if I absolutely had to find that school programming project, I'm not sure I could do that in a single day. Might take me more than a day or two to go through all those DVD labels to guess, or check, the right one. And yes, I have an index. Somewhere. Going to have to find that as well, but I think I know where it is.

So yeah, I'm rather looking forward to the day I can just ask my robot butler for that project folder I saved in 1998 and see the folder appear on my whatever-a-PC-will-be-by-then.

And then I'll check the contents, find that they are useless and chuck the folder to the bin.

Branson's wallet snaps shut for Virgin Galactic

So, Branson is folding

Apparently, erecting massive, uh, rockets, yeah rockets, doesn't do it for Branson anymore.

Typical billionnaire. He got what he wanted, now he's no longer interested.

Spanish media sues Meta for ignoring GDPR and harvesting data

"systemic and massive disregard for privacy laws"

Yup, that sounds like Meta, all right.

El Zuck will never give a flying fig about user privacy because his entire empire (and fortune) is based on pilfering that privacy.

To teach him the error of his ways will require liberal and enthusiastic percussive maintenance with bats (corked or not). Given that that is legally frowned upon, the only other option is pathetically small fines which will be royally ignored until the EU in its globality decides to fine META a year's worth of its global revenue.

Then El Zuck will start listening.

But since that won't happen . . .

Interesting. Thanks for the link.

DevTernity conference collapses amid claims women speakers were faked

Re: They might consider it private personal data that they should not give out/confirm

The they should have the balls to say so.

Magnificent corporate doublespeak

"Asked to confirm that no such person is employed at Coinbase, a spokesperson for the cryptocurrency exchange told The Register: "We’re not aware of any Coinbase employees speaking at the conference. "

I love the redirection. Do you have an Anna Boyko working for you ? I am not aware that any of our employees is going to speak at that conference.

Might as well have answered by saying that it sure looks like it'll be snowing at XMas. What was the point ? Does Coinbase consider its employee list as a secret ? In that case, are there any Coinbase employees that use social media and identify as Coinbase employees ? Because there's some cleaning to do there, if that is the case.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

"HP is squeezing more margin out of print customers"

You mean, the ones it has left.

Laser is the future. Toner can be refilled, nobody knows who did it (yet).

Ink is just you subscribing to a mafia cartel in Saville Row suits. Ditch them. Besides, do you really need to print in color ? Really ? That business presentation ? Make it a PowerPoint. Or a PDF. Nobody needs the slides on paper, and absolutely nobody will know where the paper is in a week. Send them the effin' file. Aren't we supposed to be going paperless ?

And for the few holdouts who absolutely want their pics on print, don't you know that Kodak does the job for pennies ?

Stop the nonsense. If you're a professional printer, you already don't use ink. If you're an amateur, you've got magnetic storage. If you want a wall-size print, you're not doing it on an HP inkjet.

Stop feeding the trolls. They don't deserve it.

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Re: Richard, you've damaged me!

Yup. I learned OO programming with Turbo Pascal.

Best time of my life.

World's largest nuclear fusion reactor comes online in Japan

ITER and JT

Seems that they both started construction the same year. Scientists, engineers and technicians have been collaborating on both projects. JT has achieved a monumental result already, but ITER is going to make us wait another two years.

Is it because ITER is bigger ? The wiki says "ten times the plasma volume of any other tokamak operating today", but that was before JT.

So what's the score now ?

And, hang on, whatever the score is, they planned a decade ago to have a fusion reactor ten times bigger than anything running a decade later ?

Wow.

Re: Hope this goes well

Yeah, maybe not. I hope not, anyway. With fusion we will finally do away with all the stupid greenie arguments against nuclear and be able to advance to a society where energy is no longer a problem.

I'm looking forward to seeing that start before I retire, at best, or before I die, at worst.

Oh, and I basically just turned 57, so you see, I'm really hoping.

Google submits complaints about Microsoft licensing to UK competition regulator

So, Google defending the little guy

Google, the "you have no privacy, get over it" company is defending the little guy ?

No. Google wants to be sure to get its proper share of the market, the biggest one.

You don't fool me.

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

Hmm. Maybe there's some truth to this "AI" they keep on harping about ?

Book ? You want me to say Book ? Okay, Book.

Book. Again ? Okay. Book.

Book ? Book.

Book ? Book.

Book ? BOOK !

Book ? What ? You want a fucking book ? Here's a book : [..] Now go do something intelligent with your time !

Oh no. With people, you can get bullshit that is far from what you've put in.

US readies prison cell for another Russian Trickbot developer

"$34 million of which came from 149 victims in the UK"

That's almost $230K from each.

They certainly hit the jackpot on that run.

That being said, actually being condemned to not even three years after facing a lifetime in jail ? Somehow that feels a trifle light.

Seems that white-collar crime does pay. Again.

Health crusaders prep legal challenge over NHS mega contract with Palantir

"there is no lawful basis to proceed"

Oh what a bunch of party crashers. Come on, after all the junkets they've been paid to go to and all that time quaffing champaign, eating delicious munchies and, occasionally, listening to some boring busybody tell everyone why it was important, you want to gut the trough that has been set up from which Lord only knows how many in the UK government are going to profit ?

Have you no pity ?

What's that ? UK citizens ? Who cares about them ? If they were so important, they should've gotten themselves elected.

AWS rakes in half a billion pounds from UK Home Office

"The contract – valued at £450,281,369 to be precise"

No, that's just the initial cost.

The true cost is going to be more because cloud activity will ramp up and incur cost overruns, to no one's surprise.

Uneless there's a clause in there that caps AWS on the amount it can invoice without capping the UK Home Office's activity ?

I don't think so.

Logitech's Wave Keys tries to bend ergonomics without breaking tradition

"modern" people

If I'm not mistaken, "modern" people are all under 30.

Let's talk about this again in 30 years, shall we ?

The absence of backlighting

Um, it's a wireless keyboard. You state that its two batteries should last 36 months. If it had backlighting, I'd wager you'd be complaining that the batteries last only 3 weeks.

Personally, I am at an age where backlighting is now a requirement for me to properly see which key I am bashing. As such, this keyboard is out of the question for me, but I do have to admit that it looks nice.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

"Rather than fining public sector institutions for incompetence or a lack of training"

They should fine the government for lack of funding.

Hubble science instruments still out after going down 3 times in a week

Thank you, I am completely aware of that.

So, I should expect NASA to be charged with a Hubble update any day now. Is that what you're saying ?

Because I'm saying that's not going to happen.

I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

I hope someone will step up to the plate

If replacing the gyros is all Hubble needs to continue functioning for another decade, then I hope some billionnaire somewhere will find enough loose change in his couch to make it happen.

Obviously, Space is now beyond government budgets, but the Science is still necessary. No use talking to politicians, so billionnaires is where it's at.

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

He was IT Admin. What makes you think he wants to deal with customers ?

At best, he'll be cooking the fries.

Re: NerdRageQuit

There's nothing in the article that says that he no longer had access after he was fired.

It's a university. Those things are not exactly renowned for having proper firing procedures, let alone IT procedures. I'm guessing he got called to the Head Office (or whatever equivalent), got told he was fired, and got sent back to his desk to clean up by himself and let himself out.

Yes, he's a blithering idiot and yes, he will never get work as an IT admin again. Way to capitalize on your diplomas. But there is nothing that says that he went home and wreaked havoc from there - although there's a 99% chance that the uni would not have had the administrative time to lock his account before that since unis are serially incompetent in everything IT.

So yeah, he was an idiot, but if the uni had handled the situation with proper oversight, it wouldn't have happened. The uni paid the price in inconvenience. The idiot will pay the price in a McDonalds kitchen.

Fitting for all, I say.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Now that is exceptional.

Not only did she recognize their work, but she organized money to make it official.

I always appreciate that you say thank you, but if you're putting your money where your mouth is, I give you 5 stars every time.

Roblox investor plays hardball over 'weak' parental controls

the DeKalb County Pension Fund

What are you doing investing in game companies ?

You're a pension fund. Go invest in oil or something else that lasts a long time. Gaming is one of the most volatile markets there is without you idiots throwing a monkey wrench into the mix. You have nothing doing there in the interest of your pensioners.

Go buy some Capita stock. They never seem to lose.

Six pack of sub-Neptune exoplanets hang tight around nearby star

Re: Music of the spheres

What astounds me is that, with the feeble amount of experience and empirical data we have, we can still project orbital stability over four billion years.

Thank God for Newtonian mechanics.

SAP faces more accusations of breaching on-prem customers' trust

"Our partnership with each of our customers is built on trust"

Yes. You trust that your customers will continue to shower you eternally in boatloads of money, while your customers trust that you will shaft them in every way you can find.

Weak session keys let snoops take a byte out of your Bluetooth traffic

Blutooth security

Glad to see that there are people who are keeping the industry on their toes on the matter of security. Unfortunately, automakers are still dragging their feet on that particular question.

So, until Blutooth security is wound up tight enough to force automakers to do it right, I don't see that much will change for consumers.

The specs can be complete and detailed, if the implementation sucks, there will always be vulnerabilities.

China's Loongson debuts processor that 'matches Intel silicon circa 2020'

Re: Loongson has a loong way to go

Maybe so, but the important thing is that they've started the journey.

Give them time and they may well find architectures that are better than ours.

Besides, competition is always a good thing for the consumer, right ?

AI offers some novel crystal materials that could form future chips, batteries, more

Finally, a proper use for a statistical analysis machine

I can totally believe that this is the way to go forward in creating new and useful materials to boost our technologies in every domain. Of course, as noted, a bit of fine-tuning is still required, but this can potentially bring many more returns than some stupid filter for smartphone pics.

And hey, if a machine finds us the proper compound for room-temperature superconductors, I won't complain.

That time a JPL engineer almost killed a Mars Rover before it left Earth

Re: Indeed a good "Who Me?"

Agreed.

Having to check that 10,000 pins are correctly connected, down to the last one ?

Lord preserve me from that.

Server sales down 31% at HPE as enterprises hack spending

"de-elongation and customer digestion"

My, my. To what ends corporate bullshit has to go to say that customers are simply not buying because they don't need to.

Someone else has a go at reforming US Section 702 spying powers – and nope, no warrant requirement

"that won't happen without meaningful reforms"

Indeed. So make a meaningful reform, and not this patsy of an excuse for one. Getting authorization from an FBI attorney ? Yeah, that's going to be a real hurdle. Why not just ask the janitor while you're at it ?

Virgin Atlantic flies 'world's first fossil-fuel free' transatlantic commercial flight

"There's simply not enough SAF"

Good. We have enough trouble feeding people as it is without diverting more food to fuel the tourist industry.

Build some high-speed railways. God knows you have enough space for them.

What are you saying ?

The truly rich have private jets. They don't come near the poor.

Not by a long shot.

Plex gives fans a privacy complex after sharing viewing habits with friends by default

"on by default"

So, Plex has joined Facebook, uh, sorry, Meta, in the screw-your-users-we're-selling-advertising-data market.

On by default. And you can turn it off. Yeah, sure, until the next update resets it to on. Oops, sorry, "honest" mistake, we won't do it again. At least not until the next update . . .

Ah, Zuckerberg, who would have guessed that a uni drop-out like yourself would be a trendsetter in the 3rd millenium ?

Okay, the wrong type of trend, but still . . .

Re: Why do companies think we care what anyone else is doing?

They don't. It's just an excuse to sell your viewing data to advertisers.

Activist Investor Elliott calls for a management reboot at Crown Castle

Activist investor

As soon as I read those words, I think of some asshole whose only interest is gutting the company to bolster the stock price, selling at immense profit and leaving everyone who actually worked in the dust.

Not a ringing endorsement.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Re: Stalking and financial abuse

Especially since the only thing they seem to target is the fact is that I just bought a LED flashlight, so they propose me the chance to buy more.

Pathetically useless. I have a LED flashlight now, and batteries to go with it. Suggest something more interesting, like a battery charger. But no, the vaunted AI they keep harping on can't even guess that.

What a failure.

Um, instead of proposing caveman solutions, maybe you could mention email and SMS ?

Nobody writes letters anymore. XMas is a time of Whats'App and video phone. Get with the program.

Microsoft opens sources ThreadX under MIT license

I'm all for Borkzilla-bashing, and I never miss a golden opportunity to do so (or even a copper one), but we might need a little bit more history of this RTOS before blaming Borkzilla for burying it ?

I mean, I'm sure Borkzilla will bury it, but maybe we could give it some time ? It's such a tiny thing, it is possible that might fly under the Embrace-Extend-Extinguish monster that is lurking in Redmond for little while longer ?

Maybe ?

Ukraine cyber spies claim Putin's planes are in peril as sanctions bite

"the civil aviation sector of terrorist Russia"

Um, it's terrorist Putin. It's his fault. Given the vast number of Russians who fled the country to avoid being drafted into this "special military operation", I doubt that there are that many Russians who are really into invading Ukraine. I think most of them do it because Russia is a dictatorship wearing democracy as sheep's clothing so if they don't, there's a 9mm bullet waiting for them back in the Rodina.

Now maybe, just maybe, if the Russian army was properly equipped and supplied, there would be a bit more enthusiasm on the front, but I am under the impression that the only Russians supporting this SMO are the ones who are not on the front.

In any case, this whole mess is Putin's fault and no one else's. The Russian people were not clamoring for a chance to invade Ukraine in 2019, or before.

P.S. : I do understand that Ukraine isn't really big on splitting hairs at this point.

X/Twitter booted out of Australia's disinformation-fighting club

So, Musk is digging the hole ever deeper

Yeah, don't pay your rent, your fines or anything you think you can avoid, that way you'll be able to cry about injustice and bias in front of the judge sending you to jail.

Because that is where your casual disregard for everything democratic is going to send you (I hope).

Oh, you optimist, you . .

Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size

It's a nice kick in the teeth

Shows Nadella just how much bloat is not needed to make an Operating System.

Unfortunately, however much I wish to salute this NTwhatever guy, his efforts are doomed to interest the same category of computer nerds that run Linux.

And they're not going to be interested in spending time on a Windows version when they've already got much better.

But hey, points for trying.

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

If you can't learn to cross the road safely, it doesn't matter how many people you (don't) pay to hold your hand, one day, something terrible will happen to you.

So you need to wake up and learn.

People will learn. Eventually.

The hard way.