Posts by Pascal Monett

Spooky Pillars of Creation snap reveals a dark side

Agreed. That first image makes me think of two monsters with giant mouths and tiny arms lunging at their prey somewhere off-focus.

Google kills forthcoming JPEG XL image format in Chromium

Yeah but, Chrome is for market dominance.

Google will never let that go.

Re: This is bad.

This cjxl tool, is it recent ?

Don't use GitHub, don't know how to check and the various version posts don't have a posted date.

Because, if cjxl is recent, or at least more recent than unicode, then it is a bloody shame they can't handle it.

NASA details totally doable, not science fiction plan for sending Mars rocks to Earth

Here's hoping that it will work out

The difficulties in landing anything on Mars is demonstrably non-negligeable - and that is just for stuff that was never meant to take off and come back.

This time, they want to send a robot that not only has to land intact, but must also rejoin the rover, extract the sample tubes, store them safely, and then take off and come back to Earth.

And all of that, practically on its own.

The difficulty of this mission is exponentially higher. If the engineers manage to pull this off, that will be one hell of a feather in their cap.

Russia says Starlink satellites could become military targets

Re: Russia is bluffing

He's already been very publicly humiliated by Ukraine, which didn't just roll over when Russian troops came to invade. What a surprise.

70 years of NATO doctrine stated that the Russian army was a formidable adversary. Six months of Ukraine says they're incapable of anything but retreating and waiting for General Winter.

It would seem that Putin has let the Russian army languish in 1970. He doesn't have the means to meaningfully harm any satellite constellation, either militarily or financially.

But let's cut to the chase : space will become a battlefield, because there are just too many selfish pricks in positions of power that cannot resist doing that.

For its big comeback, Intel needs to spend money – and it's making less and less of it

Re: Investment

Totally agree.

How can you not be happy that the CEO has a solid plan to get back to profits ?

Yes, it will take some time and your revenues will decline, but do you prefer that the company just fold right away ?

Investors. Worse than beancounters.

Gelsinger takes ax to Intel after chip sales slump, profit nosedives

CEO Pat Gelsinger

Was that a picture of him on stage ?

Is there an unwritten rule that says that now, all CEOs on stage must dress like their teenage son ?

Why isn't he wearing a suit ?

He's the CEO of a company that brought in $79 billion in 2021.

Steve Jobs is dead. Wear a suit.

Origins of mysterious marsquake settled: It was a meteoroid what done it

Impeccable timing

So Mars has protected Earth from at least one asteroid impact, and Bruce Willis can rest easy for a while longer.

Now, I'm guessing that an asteroid that's only 0.54 brontosauri wide is kind of difficult to detect beyond the orbit of Mars, but doesn't this mean that, when Musk will be living on Mars, he's going to need to have some form of asteroid alert system ?

And now I've just realized : on Mars you'll never see a shooting star.

Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'

"the company will follow the [EU]'s requirement for mobile devices to use USB-C by 2024"

Of course they will.

If they want to continue making money in the EU.

Sometimes, corporate behemoths don't have the last word.

I like that.

IBM India tells employees they can moonlight – but only for good causes, with permission

"cheating – plain and simple."

Maybe if you paid your employees a proper salary they wouldn't need to go find another job.

So who's cheating ?

It's 2023, let's check in with the metaverse... Nope, still doesn't exist

"using NFTs to enable access to exclusive customer experiences and perks"

Well that's me absolutely not interested.

Purpleurchin cryptocurrency miners spotted scouring free GitHub, Heroku accounts

Seems like a lot of thought went into something that doesn't have a great return.

It's a shame that some people employ so much intelligence to do such selfish things.

Google's Alphabet to review every project after $6bn decline in profits

Oh, shareholders are demanding results

I am absolutely devastated for them. Those poor billionnairs who are being deprived of 0.1% of the revenue they might have expected.

Please tell me where to send my wreath.

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

"the world's richest man"

Why does he need to borrow money ?

2023: The year SK Hynix expects profit-whacking dip to end, and 238 layer RAM to debut

"Our plan is to mass produce 238 layer by 2023."

238 layers ?

I'm missing something. There can't be 238 layers. It must be some technical 2-3-8 or something like that.

Finance watchdog warns of long-term risk Big Tech poses to competition

"understanding the impact of Big Tech on industry competition"

Oh, great.

It's only been 30 years or so, nice to see that Administrative Time is waking up.

Government IT provider UKCloud goes into liquidation

Re: I don't get it

Local providers can guarantee that your data stays local.

Amazon & co may say so, but you only have their word for it and, personally, their word isn't really enough.

UK.gov finds billions in cash for big data contracts

"We will ensure that data can be leveraged"

How reassuring.

Everyone and their dog wants to "leverage" my data.

Let's just say that I hope they didn't forget about data security.

I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

Re: Cahuzac ? Only 60 grand ?

Now that is shameful.

He should have at least been hoarding 600 grand.

Philips axes thousands amid financial loss

Only 4% ?

Hey Roy, why not go all-out and sack 40% ?

You'll be hailed as a visionary and the "other stakeholders" (ie shareholders) will be overjoyed by the drop in costs.

Oh, there's just the little problem of sustaining sales but, if you keep the marketing department, that shouldn't be a problem, right ?

Chinese carriers collectively claim to have cracked a billion 5G subs

1.4 billion people

Of course China is going to get astounding figures, given that it is a dictatorship that pushes things and that 5G is rather handy.

I have a Samsung S22, that is 5G-capable. When I'm in Luxembourg center, I'm also connected in 5G. There's just not a billion of us to do so.

Shareholders slam Zuckerberg's 'terrifying' $100b+ Metaverse experiment

"a 0.1 percent stake"

And that is exactly how much your opinion is worth to El Zuck.

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

I disagree

"The days when users have to know there's even such a thing as a file format, let alone how to handle one, should be long gone"

It is exactly the ignorance of the file format that allows miscreants to trap the clueless into clicking on attachments.

You cannot drive without a driver's license.

You shouldn't be able to use a computer without a computer license.

Know what you're doing.

To build a better quantum computer, look into a black hole, says professor Brian Cox

"a black hole does it"

A black hole does one thing : it swallows everything that passes by.

This idiot apparently thinks that black holes share things. They don't. They swallow.

Hawking radiation is not sharing information.

Microsoft's Chinese website reveals free PC Manager utility

It's exhausting

Microsoft, you build an Operating System.

The goal of an OS is to launch the programs the user wants to use.

You have no business telling the user what he should use.

Fuck off and do your job already.

Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025

Gartner

"Gartner reckons that by 2026, a quarter of the world will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse shopping, working, socializing or learning"

Well I'd say that's the nail in the coffin then.

NASA picks its UFO-hunting – sorry – unidentified aerial phenomena-hunting team

Absolutely agree.

In the 80s, when one person in a million had a camera and was able to take a shot, the UFO phenomenon was enormous.

Now that 99% of the population has the ability to take a pic whenever they feel like it, suddenly UFO pics are no longer a thing.

Wierd, isn't it ?

Could you not? BlackByte ransomware slinger twists the knife with data stealer

"The tool then grabs document files on the compromised system"

Okay, I just have a question : this tool grabs documents in the default Windows Documents folder of the user, right ?

So, if I were to actually store my documents elsewhere, what would it actually get ?

Boffins shatter data transmission speed record

100Pbps ?

Okay, if 1.8Pbps is more than all Internet traffic today, and knowing that the natural effect of having more of something is that you use it up, what is an Internet with 100Pbps goint to look like ?

Are we going to have petabytes of cat videos in VR ?

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

Ouch.

Although I have to say, I find it a bit unfair to mix the Queen in with that bag of nuts.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: If I have to look in the manual (absolute last resort of course) it's a really bad design!

I would go get a simpler alarm clock.

That one sounds way too complicated for the intended purpose.

Oops, web trackers may have leaked 3 million patients' info

Re: Google is all seeing

That's why I like NoScript.

Mine's the one with the browser that keeps my habits private.

Hardware makers criticized for eco double standards

"environmental sustainability"

That's a nice idea, but in a civilization that creates almost everything to not be repairable (looking at you, Apple), it's going to be a bit difficult to achieve.

Yes, in a car you can replace almost everything, but cars cost a lot of money and people will very quickly get very mad if they're told that thay have to buy a new one because the left axle broke down.

Anything with a circuit board ? Forget it. If it breaks, you buy a new one. The industry doesn't encourage ripping it open, testing what's broken and replacing it. Apparently, it's not "customer-friendly".

So you're going to need a nice, big salmon to slap the CEOs of those companies who sell stuff that basically can't be repaired, and use that salmon until they get a clue.

SolarWinds and Dynatrace directors resign over antitrust concerns

Section 8 of the Clayton Act

Why does there need to be a law on this ?

Simple decency says that you do not serve on the board of two competing companies.

If you are on the board of two companies and they enter into competition, the you resign from one of them.

Ah, yes, silly me : decency. That rarely exists at the Board level.

AI programming assistants mean rethinking computer science education

"Programming Is Hard – Or at Least It Used to Be"

Programming is still hard. I see that every time I explain basic Excel functions to a new class. There's always at least one member of the audience whose eyes glaze over.

Low code ? You still need to know the result you want to obtain, and that's where many people fail to achieve the desired result.

I'm not saying that you need to be more intelligent to program. I'm saying that, to program, you need a certain mindset and, if you don't have it, you're going to have a lot of trouble trying.

It's like mathematics. I've never been good at maths. I cannot count the number of times when I told people that I am a programmer and they answered "well you're good at math then". No, I'm not. A programmer doesn't use math, a programmer uses logic.

There may be logic in mathematics, but I've never been able to understand it beyond basic calculus.

This low-code, AI-assisted stuff ? It's just going to create another nightmare like Access databases and Excel spreadsheet infestations.

NASA AI shows slashing sulfur in shipping fuel cut air pollution at sea

Bunker fuel

One ship can emit as much pollution in a day as 100K cars.

I think this needs to be looked into.

How GitHub Copilot could steer Microsoft into a copyright storm

Just one question

Why would you publish copyrighted source code on a platform you do not control ?

Github is, AFAIK, open source. If your code is copyrighted, why is it available there ?

Upstart Ransom Cartel linked to REvil veterans

Re: API hashing ?

Now that is an interesting link. It's going to take me some time to wrap my head around that.

Thank you.

API hashing ?

How on Earth does that work ?

I get code obfuscation, I get memory management, I get encryption, but how do you hash an API call in a way that allows you to get a useful answer ?

I've used APIs before. If you don't send exactly the properly formatted call, you get an error in return.

So ?

Global smartphone sales come tumbling down as reality bites

About frakking time

Nobody needs to change their phone every year, and no phone is exponentially better than last year's version.

Eventually, I can accept changing every five years. Eventually.

I had to buy a new smartphone in 2012, because job change. It was a Samsung A3.

This year, all of a sudden it could no longer connect to my professional Gmail account, so I had to go and get a Samsung S22 (because no, I am not an Apple addict).

So, 2012 - 2022. That is a proper duration for a smartphone.

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

"an inability to determine productivity"

And that's the crux of the issue.

Managers today have to deal with the consequences of COVID, whic is mainly that their staff is no longer always there to be counted and under surveillance.

Maybe the pandemic willl have a good consequence, as in managers will start to pay attention to results, not just attendance.

But of course, that would mean that managers would actually become intelligent.

In what universe is that going to happen ?

UK government in talks with datacenter operators over blackouts

Re: Odd if this isn't the case any more

Not really.

Beancounters have been on the rise for the past twenty years.

Why do you think there's a component shortage ? Because Just-In-Time delivery, which removed stock (which costs money), and beancounters are notoriously adverse to spending money.

Well they're going to be real happy now.

Microsoft makes another round of jobs cuts amid slowing economy

"Like all companies"

No. What you mean to say is : "like all multi-billion dollar behemoths who have departments to waste money on".

Normal companies, like roadworks, construction and maintenance and, <gasp> accounting, they are not laying off. They are always on the hunt for new hires because they know what it is they do and they don't waste time and money with frivolous pursuits.

Your job is Windows, and now Azure.

You need 220,000 people to do that ?

No wonder updates are such a clusterfuck.

Moon has been drifting away from Earth for 2.4 billion years, rocks reveal

This must be incredibly difficult

We know that the Moon used to be closer. Thanks to the Apollo missions, we can now measure distance reliably, but that does not say anything about the past.

Finding out what was the situation millions of years ago without a time machine is going to require a lot of expertise and correlation.

This is Science at its best. Kudos to all involved.

Waferscale, meet atomic scale: Uncle Sam to test Cerebras chips in nuke weapon sims

"should global annihilation ever be desired"

I'm sorry, but the days are long gone when a country could nuke another one without consequence.

What the USA did in 1945 might have been acceptable at the time, but today it would put it at the ban of civilization.

The only reason we need nukes is to deal with asteroids - preferably far from Earth so as to influence their orbit early on.

Only a madman would actually nuke another country these days. Unfortunately, there are a few with the button available.

Japanese giants to offer security-as-a-service for connected cars

"the threat of increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks against vehicles"

That threat might be mitigated at the source by removing the entertainment and GPS section from the CAN bus.

But that would mean another set of comm threads in the car, so cost.

And we can't have that, can we ?

Children should have separate sections in social media sites, says UK coroner

Why is age verification an invasion of privacy ?

If you want to buy alcohol, you need to adult.

If you want to enter a night club, you need to be adult.

If you want to drive a car, you need to be adult.

We have long decided that there are things children shouldn't be doing, and we have put protocols in place. Why should the Internet be any different ?

Especially since the Internet is a place where the worst of human tendancies show up.

Now, I have no idea how this should happen, but I pretty much agree it should.

Boffins propose Slinky-like robot that can build stuff in space

"the current and growing orbital ecosystem"

Which has a good chance of being wiped out by the Kessler syndrome.

As for the James Webb, it's in a Lagrange point, so largely immune to the issue and also, largely impossible to repair.

But hey, yeah, one day we'll have to know how to build in space, so might as well start thinking about it.

China dumps dud chips on Russia, Moscow media moans

It's just words

"China's oft-stated ambition to crush corruption, modernize its economy, and focus only on quality development of world-leading products"

It is high time that people understand that, until there are actions that support the words, words are just a leaf in the wind.

Cops swoop after crooks use wireless keyfob hack to steal cars

I call that a successful operation

"Those arrested apparently include the software developers, its resellers, and the car thieves who used the tool"

Well done to the police forces involved.

Good coordination, good cooperation, and the miscreants go down for the count.

Now all that is needed is for the automakers to analyse the fault and correct it.

Why am I skeptical at this point ?