Posts by Pascal Monett

NASA stalls water-seeking VIPER lunar rover to 2024

Going back to the Moon is required, but there's a problem

Moon dust is really abrasive, and gets everywhere.

We're going to have to find a solution for that if we want a base that isn't constantly exposed to outer space.

Samsung teases 11 Texas fabs as $50 billion CHIPS Act vote nears

Eleven

Not one, but eleven semiconductor factories in one of the driest places on Earth.

What is wrong with these people ?

The Colorado river is already running dry what with all the almond farms in California.

Can't you choose Wisconsin, or Minnesota ?

There's water there.

Oracle, Microsoft agree to shared custody of your workloads in the cloud

Well it kinda does, because if youd cloudy server is under attack, you might not know about it until it's too late.

Of course, you can also not know about your on-prem server being under attack, but that would be because you're not paying enough attention.

Microsoft to blockheads: NFTs and blockchains aren't welcome in Minecraft

Good

Glad to see that one of my favorite games is not going to fall prey to this nonsense.

Boffins release tool to decrypt Intel microcode. Have at it, x86 giant says

"some people worrying the scripts could be used for mischievous purposes"

There's always a miscreant somewhere that will use whatever in bad ways.

That's not a reason to not do the job.

Suspected Gozi malware gang 'CIO' extradited to US on fraud, hacking charges

Another one bites the dust

He made just one mistake : he didn't live in Russia.

Judge approves Twitter's request to hurry along Musk trial to October

Re: This is just another example ...

He made a basic mistake : it's not because you have money that you know how the economy works.

But then he'll go on Twitter and rant about unfair the situation is . . .

Atlassian reveals critical flaws in almost everything it makes and touches

I would prefer : get your finger out and do the updates, then you can consider it done.

Management will wait until tomorrow to have its precious Jira timesheets if it means quashing some bugs that have been present since years. And of course they are present since years, because the bug was created in a piece of code that Atlassian has been re-using ever since.

Logical.

Microsoft Teams outage widens to take out M365 services, admin center

"I Survived the microsoft teams outage 21 July 2022"

Guys, if you have to make a T-shirt for every Borkzilla outage, . . . well, you've got successful business going there !

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

"the increasing urgency to decarbonize transportation"

There is an even more increasing urgency to decarbonize energy production but, funnily enough, nobody is talking about that.

An EV or even a hydrogen vehicle is all very nice, to be sure, but if the electricity is generated in a coal plant, all you're doing is displacing the pollution, not eliminating it.

Is Microsoft going back to the future on release cadences?

Re: Agile is pretty much the way to develop software

No it isn't.

At least, it's not the only way.

It is, however, become the way for people who can't be arsed to properly define the needs of the software and require multiple iterations to finally think : "yeah, that'll do".

The Apollo program wasn't built on agile.

I'm willing to bet that JWST wasn't built on agile.

Agile is just the excuse for the majority of people who can't plan properly.

"Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation"

Indeed not, it creates it.

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

Re: Remoaners

Apparently, you need to read this.

Alas, you can bring a horse to the trough, but you can't make it drink.

Google, Oracle clouds still affected by UK heatwave

"pride themselves on over-engineering to ensure resilience"

Pride themselves ?

More like talk about it.

Over-engineering costs money. The Cloud^TM is about making money, not spending it.

And, as this episode has proven, they didn't over-engineer their cooling systems, they put in the bare minimum to ensure "normal" operations.

Well they're going to have to go back and over-engineer that part a bit, because I'll wager that next summer, they'll be seeing those temperatures again.

Court OKs billion-dollar Play Store gouging suit against Google

"as soon as Parliamentary time allows"

A.K.A. : as soon as we've cashed in all that lovely lobby money.

After 40 years in tech, I see every innovation contains its dark opposite

Once again, convenience

Convenience will be the downfall of our civilization.

Pseudo-AI that tracks everything we look at in order to serve more of the same. Who thought that would be a good idea ?

The advertisers, of course.

Google, Oracle cloud servers wilt in UK heatwave, take down websites

"As a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region"

Might be looking to start considering those temperatures as seasonal.

So start enhancing your cooling operations.

Microsoft lures SMBs to Cloudy PCs by connecting them to Xbox accounts

"enable United States Government contractors"

Who should absolutely not be connected to The Cloud^TM in any way.

Congratulations. I'm sure Beijing is thrilled.

Security flaws in GPS trackers can be abused to cut off fuel to vehicles, CISA warns

Cut off fuel ?

It's a GPS. What the hell does that have to do with how the vehicle functions ?

I don't care that it's a tracker, the only thing it needs is power from the battery. It has nothing to do on the CAN bus.

But of course, as in all the stupid things people do, they've linked it to the CAN bus.

Morons.

Belgium says Chinese cyber gangs attacked its government and military

Yeah well, it's China

China has form in saying one thing and doing something else entirely.

Which can be said for a lot of countries these days.

Walmart-controlled flight booking service suffers substantial data leak

Okay, we won't tell you.

India's central bank calls for cryptocurrency ban

Crypto is not fine.

Exchanges are regularly folding and "clients" lose everything, while somebody makes off with the money.

The only way crypto will be fine is if it is handled by companies that have banking charters and the obligation to support the accounts of their clients - in which case, I ask : what's the point ?

Every country already has its currency that people use credit/debit cards/smartphones for without practically touching any coin (except the USA, but they obviously have a very shitty banking system, on top of their very shitty Internet network and their even more shitty telephone system).

Crypto is useless. Improve your banking system and the problem is solved.

Hush now: Baby talk has common features across languages and societies

"a special connection to infant care in human psychology"

Unless you're Klingon.

Klingons don't sing, they growl.

Sage accused of strong-arming customers into subscriptions

I don't get it

This is a technical change. Shutting down TLS 1.0 and 1.1 is a good thing, but why does that imply a change in license ?

It has nothing to do with the license, it is just a technical change that the vendor should provide for the security of its clients.

This is disgusting.

Hundreds of millions up for grabs as UK taxman set to stick with SAP ECC6.0

"saving £2 million a year"

But costing twice the price initially envisioned.

The bell tolls for the trough. Dinner time ! Cooome and get it !

Russia fines Google $374 million for letting the truth about Ukraine be told

I gather that it's a bit difficult to get full citations in Moscow at this point in time.

Gosh, really ?

"Not just restrictions but the almost-complete closure of access to foreign high-tech products is being deliberately, intentionally used against our country"

I wonder why.

Might it have something to do with the fact that you entertain Soviet-era fantasy about how your country is managed and what is going on in it ?

Maybe if you stopped murdering journalists who are just doing their job and face reality, things might start going for the better ?

IT departments often regret technology buying decisions

"Enterprise Technology Adoption Profiles (ETAs)"

Um, no. It's not ETA, it's ETAP.

Do your fucking acronyms properly.

Is the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope worth the price tag?

Re: The JWST is a boondoggle that will never meet expectations

Have you read the article ?

JWST is already exceeding expectations.

Everyone is hoping that it will continue to do so for much more than its expected lifetime.

Re: Why not make a bunch (18) of them each with a big single mirror

You don't really understand the constraints of launching a telescope on a firecracker, do you ?

The best rockets we have at the moment cannot carry anything wider than 5 meters. JWST has an operational mirror surface of 20 meters.

How do you think that happened ?

It happened because brilliant engineers thought of and constructed a folded telescope capable of deploying itself a million miles away.

Hats off to them.

It's the first time Humanity has done this. First times cost.

The next JSWT will be cheaper, because we've already done it. But there will be no single mirror.

Not until we have rockets that are 21 meters in diameter.

Crypto lender Celsius in Chapter 11 deep freeze

"Without warning, the company suspended all purchases, withdrawals, or swaps on its platform"

I'm so glad for all those people who wanted to stick it to The Man.

What a shame they chose a company that didn't have a banking charter, which would have guaranteed their money.

I wonder how many more morons losing everything it will take before they finally grok that you put your trust and money in a bone fide bank, and stop listening to siren calls ?

Life is work. Deal with it.

Banks cannot loan money they don't have.

The interest might seem like creating money, but the loaner still needs to be productive in the real world in order to pay it.

Why $52b chip subsidies are being held up – and what the White House is doing about it

"These are the subsidies Intel and others have been clamoring for"

Intel is clamoring for subsidies ?

It has made 306 billion dollars since 2019. Why should the Government hand over even more money when Intel is already practically printing its own ?

Meet Mantis – the tiny shrimp that launched 3,000 DDoS attacks

So, now they attack via HTTPS

Apparently, these state-sponsored hackers (looking at you, Putin) will just continue to evolve their tech in order to fuck things up to the max.

It's really too bad clearly intelligent people use their knowledge like that.

EU court says it can probe M&As even when one party has no European operations

"even if one of the parties has no operations in the EU"

Um, that would mean that one of the companies has operations in the EU, in which case, yes, that sounds perfectly normal to me.

Good news: Twitter fell over. Bad news: It's working again

So Twitter was down

And nothing of importance was lost . . .

Former CIA engineer Joshua Schulte convicted of spying over WikiLeaks dump

"one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history"

I think it's more the NSA that is guilty of that.

Samsung has 24Gbps GDDR6 ready for higher-performance graphics cards

24Gbps per pin

Sheesh.

When will it stop ?

Honestly. We've been fed incredible increases for over five decades now. Yes, the acceleration has slowed, but it hasn't stopped.

One day, we're going to have to hit the limits of physics.

When ?

Your top 5 liquid cooling quandaries answered, according to Omdia

Interesting post.

Personally, I think immersion is not a bad idea (maybe it needs some tuning), but I do have one question : what about the HDDs/SSDs that need swapping out ?

Is it possible to swap a live failed disk and replace it in a tank of liquid (with or without gloves) ?

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Smiley

I never use emojis at work. I do use the smiley, which is not an emoji for me before I was using it before emojis existed.

If I'm texting with someone I know, I can use the wink smiley occasionally, but that will be the extent of it.

With my wife however, I'll use whatever emoji fits my SMS the best.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

"Linux is the top guest operating system in Azure"

Azure wouldn't exist if it weren't for Linux.

Borkzilla actually tried to make its Azure platform run on Windows Server, and it failed abysmally.

So yeah, Borkzilla is now a Linux advocate - except on the desktop.

The leopard isn't changing its spots, it's just trying to survive in a world which needs it less and less.

Re: judge it by what it's doing today

That's the point.

You get to choose between four evils now.

Aren't you lucky ?

Accenture bags IT services contract for UK tax collector

Timelines on a £7 billion project are slipping

Color me shocked.

Shocked, I say.

I wonder when that project will get to £10 billion.

I'm guessing before the end of the year, and with nothing to show for it.

Really, why does UK Gov keep throwing money into that pit ?

Oh, sorry, silly me : snoughts in the trough.

Here's one way past Moore's law: Chips that mix photonics and electronics

"Provided these opto-processors make it out of the lab"

You mean, like the carbon nanotubes we've been promised for the last 25 years ?

Or the revolutionary batteries we still can't buy but have not stopped hearing about ?

Research is indispensable, but I would really like for these people to stop hyping up a product that doesn't exist and won't for decades.

It's like that fly at the picnic. Won't go away, and you can't do anything about it except shoo it off.

Annoying.

Call me back when they have a product that sells.

Behold: The first images snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope

And the harvest starts

We've waited a long time, we've been impatient, but now we will reap the rewards of the work of thousands of people devoting years of their life to this project.

I salute them all.

These centrifugal moon towers could be key to life off-planet

We haven't been present long enough on the Moon to have any data on that.

That said, it is probably not much better than zero gravity.

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

"It is possible to pay a fixed, one-time fee to activate a monthly option permanently"

Yes, it's called buying the car.

If I buy a car, I expect all of it to work for the price I pay.

The only thing I am willing to pay for after the purchase of the vehicle is the yearly update of the GPS data.

And that is final.

Microsoft's July Patch Tuesday fixes actively exploited bug

"usually a specially crafted Office or Adobe document"

And once again the lesson is : don't open attachments from people you don't know.

Watch a RAID rebuild or go to a Christmas party? Tough choice

Interesting point.

Thank you for that insight.

I do backups on optical of everything that is really important to me.

The NAS is basically an enormous storage zone. I can lose everything on it, I won't lose sleep over it.

Because I have my backups.