Posts by Pascal Monett

Accenture announces 'Accenture Song' – not a tune, but a rebrand

"post-pandemic accelerated metaverse continuum experience consultancy"

Dear Lord, my bullshit bingo card just had a meltdown . . .

Google releases beta version of Android 13 'Tiramisu'

Tiramisu

I absolutely love Tiramisu. It is by far the best dessert in existence (YMMV).

That said, I don't think I'll ever see it on my A3 (purchased in 2017).

It's frustrating how all these advances are stifled by operator inertia.

Microsoft points at Linux and shouts: Look, look! Privilege-escalation flaws here, too!

Absolutely thrilling

Borkzilla has discovered that its malformed offspring is not the only thing in the Universe that has issues.

I'm so choked I'm almost going to shed a tear.

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

"We're not concerned so much with bold innovations as we are with careful engineering"

That is a refreshing attitude.

I just might give it a try, just to find out how it works.

Apple's grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under latest draft EU rules

Chrome does indeed have a near monopoly, and the only reason it doesn't have 99% of the market is Safari.

All of the other browsers are in the very low single-digit market share.

But that is not because Google is pushing Chrome, it's because users do not understand - or care - about which browser they actually use.

Funnily enough, they care enough to not use Edge, though, but you can't legislate on that.

Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

"unlock the potential of Twitter"

Well, if Musk can actually make something useful out of a bunch of twats, good for him.

I'll still ignore the whole thing.

US Space Force unit to monitor region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit

Wrong, it gives you an advantage over your enemy - until you run out of rocks.

Then they can use axes if they want, the outcome is inevitable.

It seems obvious that, in space, it'll be Navy ranks on spaceships.

The only Army guys on board will be the jugheads in the hold, being transported to their deployment positions on Ceti Alpha Two.

Apart from the inevitable brawls in the canteen, Navy and Army don't mix - even in space.

YouTube terminates account for Hong Kong's presumed next head of government

Here, brush up on your knowledge of History.

Re: total nitpick

Have one of these, it'll make things better (if only for a while) :)

Churchill was ready to go for it.

I would contend that there is actually a need for regime change in the USA.

For far too long has the political pie been carved out between Dems and Repubs, and the latter are going decidely loony.

You need another political party to shake up the house of cards you've got going over there. It's starting to smell bad.

Take this $15m and make us some ultra-energy-efficient superconductor chips, scientists told

Re: Déjà vu

Indeed.

I once had the opportunity to go do helpdesk stuff in a warehouse that stored milk products (ice cream, etc). It was cooled to -30°C.

It was in winter, outside temperature was around 0°C, but sunny. I spent all of twenty minutes there.

When I left the place, I had to take my coat off. For a few minutes, I felt like I was on the beach, what with the sun and all.

Of course, 0°C caught up with me pretty quick and I put my coat back on after a few minutes.

Still, I don't think there'll be a lot of helpdesk people poking around racks that are cooled at 4.7°K.

I can't imagine the amount of energy that is going to be needed to cool an entire server farm down to that point.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba makes 9 datacenter energy patents available

The bottom line

So, the bottom line is Alibaba is polluting more.

Well, increasing the number of datacenters is going to have that effect. As such, you can apply that argument to every single tech giant today. Amazon, IBM, Borkzilla, they're all doing it. And ?

The bottom line is this : nuclear (fusion when we get it) is the future.

You don't like that idea ? Fine, throw away your smartphones, your IoT shit, your electric car, your washing machine (and dryer), your dishwasher and everything else but your LED lights, your fridge, freezer, TV and sound system.

If we get back to the bare minimum, then yeah, solar, wind and a few coal plant will be enough. But we're not going to do that.

So, while Greenpeace studiously ignores all the coal plants that are being fired up to cope with the fact that its activities for the last fifty years have stifled the only viable solution we have, don't blame datacenters for doing their job.

We need nuclear. Not pressure water reactors that make plutonium so we can get yet more world-destroying nuclear bombs, no. We need Thorium reactors, and fusion reactors when we can get them. Once we have that, two smartphones and an electric car per person will be less of a problem, and datacenters won't be a problem at all.

Engineers up the torque to get Lucy's solar array latched

"Lucy is approximately 105.1 million km from Earth"

Won't anyone think of Scarlett Johansson ?

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

That is understandable today.

In the 1980's, it was not.

I bow before such experience

I never even knew there was such a thing as a hard-sector discs.

And I've been using floppies since the IBM PC with double 360kb 5¼" floppies.

Salute to the master.

macOS Server discontinued after years on life support

Re: If only...

NT server was one of the best things that Borkzilla has ever made.

If only Borkzilla could rediscover its roots . . .

Re: A final shot to the head for a twitching zombie

And people complain when I say that Apple is not a network-oriented business.

Former NHS AI leader joins US spy-tech firm Palantir

Palantir

Somehow, I think that this world would be a much better place if disgraced companies were torched to the ground and their company leaders with them.

But that's just my opinion.

In any case, another bright mind lost to Humanity.

Congratulations, Peter Thiel.

Google bans third-party call-recording apps from Play Store

Re: Why can't I just record my calls with my choice of software

Because your choice of software does not use Google's servers to store the data and get harvested.

Simples.

Google mouths words about user security, but Google is all about getting every data stream going to Google.

Uni team demo algorithm to shield conversations from eavesdropping AI

Sorry, what about white noise ?

I seem to recall that a simple white noise generator (check V for Vendetta, among others), aka the go-to spy covert-conversation-protector, is largely enough to confuse a microphone while retaining human ear's capability of listening to one's neighbour.

Have physics changed, or has that always been a red herring ?

Oracle users fail to get that moving apps to cloud means business transformation – Gartner

Incredible

It never ceases to astonish me how software vendors (Borkzilla, Oracle, etc) redefine the business environment without for one second asking businesses if that is what they need.

More astonishing is the fact that businesses appear to not mind very much, given the lack of lawsuits over being forced to change when no change was needed from a business point of view.

And we're not talking about mom&pop shops, we're talking about Fortune 1000 companies. How is it that nobody among those CEOs called up Larry and said "Are you done fucking with my business ? I've got money to make and markets to corner, I don't have time to waste lining your wallet" ?

And I'm supposed to believe that these Fortune 1000 CEOs have no clue as to what they got themselves into ?

That is a hard pill to swallow.

Amazon to spend 11 days of annual profit developing robot warehouse workers

Re: Will they be complaining "robots are taking my job?"

I would agree with you completely if not for that fact that, if those workers got a job at Amazon shifting boxes, it's likely that they didn't find a job anywhere else.

I doubt very much that any Amazon employee set out one morning with the urge to get a job where pissing in a bottle to not take a break is almost a routine procedure.

So, yeah, I'm all for making robots to handle dull, repetitive tasks, but what happens to the people who lose their jobs to it ? Are they going to be able to find work somewhere else ?

And if they could, wouldn't they already have ?

Elon Musk says he can get $46.5bn to buy Twitter

Ah, the beauty of having all the money in the world

You can lift a finger, and banks will fall over themselves to loan you billions more.

I fully understand the financial operations involved, and I get why the banks are willing, but honestly, with his fortune, shouldn't the banks just be : "meh, you've got the money, finance this yourself" ?

But of course, that's not the kind of world we live in.

Intel forms graphics lab to make games look more real

Re: Thanks, but graphics are already as realistic as wanted

I would tend to agree. It's a game. It doesn't need to be 100% photorealistic.

It does, however, need to be optimised to not create lag simply because there's too much to render.

When I'm playing Minecraft, or Diablo III, I'm not interested in realistic. When I'm playing 7 Days to Die, I find the world quite realistic enough.

We're good on realism, I think. Let's get this thing optimized even more to up the framerates. There's never enough of those.

Insteon's vanishing act explained: Smart home biz insolvent, sells off assets

And people wonder why I refuse to buy IoT shit.

Machine-learning models vulnerable to undetectable backdoors: new claim

"Said one individual on Twitter"

Yes, because Twitter is a vast reference of people who only post about things they are experts in.

Biotech firm: Graphcore IPUs faster for AI-based drug discovery than GPUs

LabGenius

Soon to be bought by Nvidia.

So, what happened with GitHub, Heroku, and those raided private repos?

Bit by bit, we will learn

All these online repositories are teaching us security in a way a classroom just couldn't.

There's nothing like real-life situations to raise awareness, and the Internet makes security a 24/7 affair.

I guess in ten years' time, there will be exhaustive classes on security, full of "lessons learned" (or an Internet Security For Dummies* book), that will actually be useful enough to ensure that people who take them will know all of what to avoid.

* : yes, I know, there is one already. What I mean to say is that, in a decade or so, we'll likely have enough experience to ensure that all aspects are covered, including online repositories, stacks and other VMs. We're not done finding out how our data can be hacked, is what I'm saying.

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

The fact remains that a URL is not much help when your desktop is screwed to the point where it cannot connect to the Internet.

Once upon a time, documentation was a local affair, and it was more or less useful following how much work was put into it.

Nowadays, it's just a throwaway thought and you've got to scour the Web's technical forums and pray that enough people have had your problem so that somebody might have been good enough to post something somewhere that is actually a solution.

But actual help from the original vendor ? Or some technical specifications that are up-to-date ?

Rarer than hen's teeth, these days.

Yup, mileage varies.

My Synology is now equipped with four 8TB drives, managed in RAID 5.

It's occupied by about 55%.

I don't think even the most recent, most expensive smartphone is going to be able to handle that, especially not in RAID 5.

Growing US chip output an 'expensive exercise in futility', warns TSMC founder

So TSMC is basically preparing the failure

Warning that costs are high, the workforce is scarce, etc . . all of that is just laying down the groundwork for when the Texas plant will never open.

Or, when it does, it will be with reduced capacity and it will stay that way for all the years TSMC has tax exemptions for.

Then it will more everything back to Taiwan.

Just you watch.

Ex-eBay security director to plead guilty to cyberstalking

As per the article : "[eBay] cooperated fully and extensively with law enforcement authorities throughout the process".

I'm going to leave eBay the benefit of the doubt. A former FBI goon turned security officer obviously forgot that he wasn't working for the FBI any more, and used the usual procedures a tad too automatically.

That says a lot more about the FBI than it does about eBay.

Brave, DuckDuckGo to unplug Google's AMP where possible

"Google [..] maintains that AMP is here to help make the web better"

Oh I am certain that Google is absolutely right. AMP is definitely here to help make the web better - for Google.

The only way I would even start trusting Google on this matter is if it were proven that ad revenue on AMP pages was entirely sent to the original page owners.

That is obviously not what is happening. Google found a way to host popular pages on its own servers specifically in order to deprive web sites of ad revenue and rake it all in.

Somehow, I feel that that should result in a class action lawsuit - except hold the lawyers to a fixed revenue, not a (lion's) share of the spoils.

Five Eyes nations fear wave of Russian attacks against critical infrastructure

I have just one question

Why wasn't this alert sent out the day after Putin invaded Ukraine ?

With, eventually, a reminder today to stay on your toes ?

US warns North Korean Lazarus gang rising against cryptocurrency outfits

"Lazarus [..] is casting a wide net with this campaign"

Let slip the dogs of war !

Scammers scamming scammers. I am not concerned.

Infosys noncompete clause sparks complaint from labor rights org

So the Infosys lawyer saying no has no importance ?

What I'm saying is that this is never going to get to court in the first place.

Not if laywers are doing their job.

"an illegal noncompete clause"

If it's already illegal, then what's the problem ?

The employee leaving goes to a competitor, Infosys sues alledging the non-compete clause, judge throws it out of court. End of story.

Logically, the lawyer Infosys contacts will say so and not take the job.

Why is this an issue ?

Intel: Our fabs can mass produce silicon qubit devices

"manufacture qubits at scale"

So, entangled atoms can be engraved in a silicon process.

Who knew ?

I would have thought that you needed to do something to achieve entanglement. If they have actually found a way to entangle atoms in an engraving process, well congratulations.

Somehow, I am doubtful though.

UK Prime Minister, Catalan groups 'targeted by NSO Pegasus spyware'

Well duh

"Governments around the globe have not done enough to investigate or stop human rights violations caused by invasive spyware like Pegasus"

Obviously. Governments around the world are using said spyware.

That is the one point where they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

"Twitter is a rainforest ecosystem of creatures interacting and feeding off each other"

Oohhh. What a revelation.

I feel the urge to join the rainforest and prance about in virgin lands.

Then I remember we're talking about Twitter.

Ok, I'll pass.

Space Launch System dress rehearsal canceled for repairs

"If at first you don't succeed... you're probably NASA"

Come on, that was a bit harsh.

NASA has had plenty of successes, some of them downright awesome. Wasn't there this thing with the telescope last year where NASA learned to maneuver it using solar wind ? Is that not a bloody awesome success ? Don't its rovers regularly exceed their life expectations by years at a time (um, when they land successfully, that is) ?

It's called rocket science. It's difficult.

I think we can cut them some slack.

Beanstalk loses $182m in huge flash-loan crypto heist

Re: Even gold is a fiat currency

Well, truth be told, gold does have intrinsic value in specific areas, namely space (satellites/telescopes) and medical (I'm thinking dentures, but surely there are other applications). Also, sometimes gold can be used in computing for, again, very specific cases.

So gold is shiny, but not only.

I'm thrilled that you have enough vocabulary to know the word "fiat", but do you know what it means and what that implies ?

It means that the State (or Country) guarantees the money and its value. It also means that the State will track down thieves and bring them to justice.

<sarc>Except when the thieves are operating in Wall Street. Those guys can steal all they want, it's legal.</sarc>

DeFi cannot turn to the State to recover anything. DeFi has no case because nothing was hacked, some smart ass just gamed the system. He actually followed the rules and used them to his advantage. There is no judge in the civilized world that will blame that guy for anything.

One more thing about fiat currency : it has two thousand years of experience being attacked, taken at gunpoint, broken into and stolen in various ways, and the sum of its rules are designed to thwart all possible attacks.

Funny money is relearning all the lessons - the hard way.

Windows 11 usage stats within touching distance of... XP

"This situation will likely continue [until] businesses are given a compelling reason to upgrade"

Absolutely.

Borkzilla is finding out that businesses have other things to do then jump every time Borkzilla says so.

And about bloody time too.

IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse

Also a fair chance that the person didn't get any bonus.

It's IBM, remember ? IBM has form in screwing over its salespeople.

When the expert speaker at an NFT tech panel goes rogue

"the process can be secure and run honestly"

Oh, sure it can be, but that does not guarantee security or honesty.

Not enough, guv'nor. Not enough.

All these years and I have not seen a single useful application based on blockchain.

Twitter preps poison pill to preclude Elon Musk's purchase plan

Yes. That way we'll know who to avoid.