Posts by Pascal Monett

Back-to-office mandates won't work, says Salesforce's Benioff

Absolutely agreed.

You're paying for my work, not for having me come into the office.

My being in the office or not is now irrelevant. COVID proved that.

So you pay me and you skimp on the office. You still win, in the end.

Semiconductor boom could be coming to an end – analysts

What ?

"the chip industry is heading for a slowdown because of companies stockpiling components"

Stockpiling components from where ?

We've been repeatedly told about shortages, especially in the automobile industry, and now, suddenly, there are companies that have magically created stockpiles of stuff ?

Someone needs to explain this to me.

Teslasuit demo: Taking a crack at force feedback with the 'Glove'

Indeed.

And until it is interested, this will remain very, very niche.

But if it gets good enough for the sex industry, it'll make a fortune.

NSO claims 'more than 5' EU states use Pegasus spyware

"carefully contracted to only permit legitimate use"

I would love to have the transcript of the contract discussions with Putin.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

Yes, but that is in a future that doesn't exist yet, so the value of that argument is somewhat diminished in the now.

Cisco quits Moscow

So, the war with Eastasia continues . . .

Now Amazon debuts an AI programming assistant – CodeWhisperer

"those that have bet the farm on machine smarts"

Those who have done that will not survive for very long.

Machines do not have smarts, they have faulty training data and I have yet to read an article about how absolutely astonishingly good some newfangled pseudo-AI thingamajig is.

If what you're doing is that difficult, make sure you have a fully-staffed engineering department.

You'll last longer.

If you didn't store valuable data, ransomware would become impotent

"Who will want to do business with you in the future?"

Ask Talk-Talk.

Somehow, they're still in business.

SpaceX: 5G expansion could kill US Starlink broadband

Re: Ouch

That's life.

You are born wet, cold and hungry, and then it all goes downhill from there.

Intel withholds Ohio fab ceremony over US chip subsidies inaction

"now it's time for us to move forward rapidly"

This just in : 4th quarter revenue is $20 billion.

Pat, if you want to move forward rapidly, I think you have the money to do it.

I am tired of repeatedly seeing that it is the richest companies that profit the most from subsidies.

I'm not bashing the principle of subsidies, I'm sure it's a good thing, but dammit, why do Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel & Co get the lion's share when they're already stuffed with cash ?

Something's wrong here.

ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power

Yay, we have finally reinvented the terminal

We now have a 21st century screen that can do nothing on its own and requires a server to be useful.

Progress ?

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

So they're looking to put fissile material on a rocket

The discussions about that are going to be interesting, not to mention that any nuclear reactor they send up in space will have to fit inside the payload are of whatever launcher they wish to use.

Here's to hoping that the launcher functions to perfection when the time comes.

Alta Devices state that their tech reaches 29.1% efficiency.

By what magic do you estimate that their tech will be 10 times more efficient on the Moon ?

Xi Jinping himself weighs in on how Big Tech should deploy FinTech

Combat monopoly

That's a bit rich coming from someone who absolute monopoly on power in his country.

HCL to end all support for old versions of Notes and Domino in 2024

Re: none of them can do all the stuff that Notes still can

I still remember the IT director of an important Luxembourg company (which I will not disclose, obviously), who told me that, when they were looking to replace a mainframe (sorry, don't have the details), they asked Microsoft for a quote.

The answer ? 50 NT servers.

50.

If that doesn't boggle your mind, I don't know what will.

The result ? They went with a Solaris server and Domino 4 (yeah, that's how old this is).

I have to say, I hate IBM. They had a great product, with incredible abilities, and they never approached the Fortune 1000 to explain just how indispensable Notes is.

Just my 2 cents, as we say these days.

"HCL promises upgrades are now easy"

They've been easy for a long time, development-wise. Heck, all the @functions from R3 (and probably from R1) are still there.

Notes/Domino has a long-established history of backwards compatibility, as far as developers are concerned. If you go to OpenNTF, you'll find plenty of apps written before R9 that still work. Maysoft has the Notes Document Viewer since forever (well, their copyright states 2002), and it is an extremely handy tool that I use regularly on R9 and R10 platforms. I'm sure it'll work fine on R12.

From a developer's perspective, I don't see what the problem is.

Of course, admins might have a different perspective, but I don't see that updating from R9 to R10 made any great difficulties in the companies I work with.

This announcement is just to remind Domino users that R9 is end-of-support. Well, okay then, but it won't prevent people from running their servers, no more than Windows XP has stopped running (and running, and running).

That said, R12 seems quite interesting, but obviously jumping from R9 to R12 is going to be a bit of a hassle.

A miserable work week spent toiling inside 'the metaverse'

Oh, so the positive-VR posts don't ?

Eye strain and nausea

I already heard about that when Quake came out.

Doesn't happen to me, but that doesn't mean I'm a fan of VR. I'm not.

What bothers me with VR is having a headset when I have two gorgeous 26"+ screens sitting on my desktop.

What bothers me is that I am already perfectly immersed in today's games (7 Days to Die is unbelievable).

I don't need to shackle myself with a kilogram of poor performance to watch Nintendo-style graphics , thank you very much.

Microsoft pulls Windows 10/11 installation websites in Russia

Re: One More reason to duump Windows...

How's the weather in Moscow these days ?

Meta now involved in making metalevel standards for the metaverse

"seven-hour surgeries"

I would think that a surgury is a situation where you stay focused on a very limited amount of space. You're not driving a car, flying a plane or walking around town turning your head every which way.

So yeah, maybe for surguries this tech is good, and so much the better.

The funny thing is, humans tend to not like to have stuff stuck on their faces in order to just move around.

Graphical desktop system X Window just turned 38

"Wayland's privacy controls mean that recording a video of what's happening onscreen is difficult."

Does that mean that tools like Teamviewer couldn't work ?

That's a death sentence in the business arena (not that that should be a problem for a Linux distro).

This startup says it can glue all your networks together in the cloud

"Cloud was supposed to make life easier"

Yes. Supposed to. That's certainly how it has been sold (and is still being sold).

Unfortunately, the reality of the fact that you're depending on someone else's server tends to get in the way.

Spain, Austria not convinced location data is personal information

Re: Hm, I'd say..

Agreed, but if you want your mobile phone to be useful, the telco has to know which tower can contact you.

This is going to be a thorny problem.

Liftoff at last for South Korean space program

So, South Korea can launch satellites now

Good for them.

More surveillance satellites are on the way, undoubtedly.

Mars Express orbiter to get code update after 19 years

Astounding

20 years after launch and they're updating the software with a better version from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.

Space engineers are the coolest.

Okta says Lapsus$ incident was actually a brilliant zero trust demonstration

"Okta was not satisfied with Sitel's actions and has parted ways with the company"

Well if you've got something that works and you get screwed by some 3rd-party, it obviously isn't pleasant and this outcome is hardly surprising.

Funny how the same thing never happens to Microsoft . . .

Toyota wants 'closed loop' EV batteries in its future cars

"a closed loop battery manufacturing process"

I like the idea.

Electric/hybrid vehicles are certainly nice, and it'll be a great thing for city dwellers when the noise of traffic is lowered to just the sound of tires on the road, but I've always been sceptical about the battery issue.

Not to mention that, if this is truly supposed to be a "green" solution, then we'll need to get rid of coal power plants - but okay, baby steps.

It will however be quite reassuring to know that batteries have become like aluminium cans - endlessly recyclable.

If we ever get there.

GitHub's AI code assistant Copilot takes flight. And that'll be $10 a month, please

Agreed.

If you're a "savvy developer", you know what you're doing and how to do it and you don't want any auto-complete to write your code.

Plus, it'll be your name on its bugs.

No thank you.

Info on 1.5m people stolen from US bank in cyberattack

"it was compromised between December and April 2021"

Confusing.

April comes after December, and typically in the year that follows.

So it was December 2020 and April 2021.

Just to be clear.

We are of the same mind.

For a few days earlier this year, rogue GitHub apps could have hijacked countless repos

Am I glad that I'm not in this circus

"If a software vendor's private repository that contains their source code and intellectual property was leaked or deleted, this could literally mean the end of that company"

The code I write goes on a company server and stays there. The code itself can only be modified by very few people, and they have specific IDs. There is zero risk of some random nobody reaching the server, much less accessing the database and even less deleting it.

The Notes/Domino world has a lot of advantages.

Microsoft promises to tighten access to AI it now deems too risky for some devs

"our laws are lagging behind"

I'm pretty sure that, as soon as some senator finds himself in a porno video that he never participated in, the laws will catch up pretty quick.

Samsung invests in ML chip startup NeuReality

Such is the world of venture capital

You don't have to have a product for people to shower you with money.

Then you can Magic Leap yourself into a life of wealth, even if you've got nothing to show for it.

NeuReality is going to be successfull - ML is already a thing so it can toy around with chip designs as long as the money keeps flowing in.

And when it stops coming, they'll just declare that the experiment was a brilliant success.

AWS buys before it tries with quantum networking center

"photons can't be amplified, so their range is limited"

Well their range currently seems to be about 16 billion light-years. I'd say that's not too shabby.

They're also used in oceanic fiber lines, which span several thousand kilometers and are multiplexed to the max, so it's not the photons that are the problem.

Entangled photons, well that's another subject. And a quantum network is going to have to work with switches and other networking gear I don't even know about, so that's very likely going to be an issue.

But a photon's range is until it hits an obstacle, however distant.

Tencent's WeChat wants no more talk of cryptocurrency and NFTs

"Beijing believes crypto is a dangerously unruly innovation, and mining it is a waste of resources"

I completely agree.

But I wouldn't stop people from talking about it.

Then again, my name is not Xi Pooh.

DRAM prices to drop 3-8% due to Ukraine war, inflation

"stimulate demand in markets like PC and smartphones where sales have waned"

Um, guys, you might have noticed that you gorged yourselves in 2020-2021 amid a global pandemic ?

Do you really think you're going to profit again when all those people who'd never bought a laptop now have one and are (mostly) physically going back to work ?

You can lower your prices, but the fact is that a whole bunch of people now have a laptop they use less and less. It will last them a looooong time (well, until the battery fails, at least), and during that time they won't be buying again, whatever your prices are.

You need to set your expectations back to 2019, before the panic. That's about the best you can expect now.

How refactoring code in Safari's WebKit resurrected 'zombie' security bug

"engineers tidied up [..] their source code, and [..] reintroduced the exploitable bug"

So, they "tidied up", but did not test.

Or, at the very least, did not test against proven vulns.

Coding is not always easy, but this seems slightly sloppy.

Voicemail phishing emails steal Microsoft credentials

Re: use Notepad

<user mode>What's Notepad ?</user mode>

I agree that checking is easy - when you know how a computer works.

Now tell me, when you order a laptop online, when you buy a smartphone, when you go to a store to buy a computer, does the personnel on site ask you if you know how to use it ? Do they require that you watch a training video ?

No, they don't.

So you know what Notepad is and how to use it. Good for you.

Unfortunately, I think that 99% of IT consumers don't, and have no idea of why it is important.

CISA and friends raise alarm on critical flaws in industrial equipment, infrastructure

"Fifty-six vulnerabilities [+4] – some deemed critical – have been found"

I think the hackers already know . . .

End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition

So, advertising doesn't bring in enough money then ?

$256 billion isn't enough to offer a free service ?

I think that's called greed, pure and simple.

Wi-Fi hotspots and Windows on Arm broken by Microsoft's latest patches

Brilliant

Another brilliant justification for AutoPatch, right SatNad ?

If AI chatbots are sentient, they can be squirrels, too

"different voices for reading aloud kids books compared to horror stories"

I would really like to hear Hannibal Lecter read Little Red Riding Hood.

"The better to see you with" would gain a whole new dimension.

Plot to defeat crypto meltdown: Solend votes to seize, liquidate whale account

"emergency powers to liquidate its largest customer account"

I'm sorry, but if I had €100 million in the bank, and suddenly found out that the bank's other customers had voted to liquidate my account, I would be pissed to the extreme.

As noted, it's hilarious to watch all these "decentralize" zealots suddenly rush to centralize when their feet go cold.

I love fireworks.

There are 24.6 billion pairs of credentials for sale on dark web

Re: 6.7 billion

Likely.

Now, let's forward to when all that is "biometric" data.

Remind me how I can change my fingerprints ?

Apple update approach 'not realistic' in enterprise, but login 'shim' gets thumbsup

Doesn't seem to be the case from the article.

And if you have to go check your OS settings to ensure that you do not lose work, well I'm not impressed.

But don't worry, Borkzilla's AutoPatch is sure to bring us much entertainment in not so long.

"Apple demonstrates they don't have a deep appreciation of the enterprise"

Ouch.

That said, I'm sorry but even as an individual user, I don't appreciate the idea of losing everything I am working on because somebody else decided I have to update now.

Atos CFO to follow CEO out the door following 'Evidian' split plans

"Atos and the UK government have settled out of court in a case involving an circa $1 billion (£854 million) supercomputer contract for the UK's Met Office. The case brought by Atos was over claims that the Met Office and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) had breached procurement law and unfairly dismissed the Atos bid, awarding the contract instead to Microsoft"

So, Atos pulled a Bezos but actually won, and is getting paid for it.

Good for Atos.

Capital One: Convicted techie got in via 'misconfigured' AWS buckets

"Quite an expensive misconfiguration"

Indeed.

And I fail to see how a "financial giant" doesn't have personnel sufficiently trained to set up a server.

Ten years ago I set up a website for the company I was an associate in. It took me all of an hour to find the data to understand and properly lock down the .htaccess file to ensure that the entire file structure of our server would not be accessible.

I'm not an engineer, just a University-level graduate. It's not rocket science.

Unbelievably clever: Redbean 2 – a single-file web server that runs on six OSes

Impressive

Even more impressive : the fact that there are still some people intelligent enough - and dedicated enough - to actually understand how our computers work and build the environment to demonstrate it.

Back in the day, I purchased the Norton's PC Bible. It was a very enlightening experience, finding out how things actually happened at the hardware level. Thanks to that book, I toyed around with creating moving objects in graphics mode on my 4-colour IBM-PC 640*320 CRT screen (that was high-resolution, back then).

These days, there is no more PC Bible, there is a PC library, and it would take years for a newcomer to grasp all of it.

Kudos to the creator of this tool.

Indian government issues confidential infosec guidance to staff – who leak it

Whoa there

"patch promptly, run anti-virus software, log off when away from one's desk, and encrypt data before transmission"

We're talking about government. That means that there's an IT department that calls the shots on patching.

As for encrypting, that would be difficult if IT has not installed and configured the tools to do so. The user is not supposed to be able to do that on his own, now is he ?

And if you think I'm logging off to go take a piss, I have news for you : I'm pressing Windows-L to lock my session and not lose my work.

I appreciate the intent, but there's a lot here that doesn't really depend on just the user.