Posts by Pascal Monett

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.

Yeah, silly me.

WD, obviously. My memory must have fixated on one of my first hard drives.

Sorry for that slip.

When I decided to purchase a Synology DS414j, I said to myself that I had to stage the purchase of disks to avoid that problem.

As a result, the first month I bought a Seagate and a Winchester 3TB disk. The second month I bought another Winchester 3TB disk, and the third month I bought the final HDD.

When I decided to replace them with 8TB disks, I did the same, staging the procurement process through three months.

I'm hoping that that will avoid me the kind of problem that is outlined in this article.

Japanese chip plant back online after lightning strike

Lightning strikes

No matter how advanced we think our technology is, lightning will always be able to surprise us.

UK Info Commissioner slams use of WhatsApp by health officials during pandemic

"a review of how and whether messaging services should be used for government business practices"

This is just preparing the road to another trough where billions will be spent for a "government-secure messaging system" which will never actually see the light of day.

Mark my words.

Is this you in this explicit snap? No, it's just Discord phishing

"no-one should assume their level of technical expertise exempts them from risk"

I'm not sure I totally agree with that statement.

If your level of expertise is click-on-any-attachment-or-link-regardless-of-if-you-know-the-sender-or-not, then yeah, you're at risk.

But if your level of expertise is I-don't-know-you-and-I-will-not-click-that, then you're pretty much immune to that risk.

Twitter claims Elon Musk bailed from sale with 'invalid and wrongful' reasons

"vowing to see the deal through to a conclusion"

So, Twitter didn't want it to happen, and Twitter wants to see the deal through.

I tire of these stupid money games.

In the end, this is a brilliant demonstration that it is not because you have money that you are better than anyone else.

PC sales take double-digit tumble in Q2 amid economic downturn

"things are blaming down"

Well I guess that's a good thing, but it's no surprise that PC are on the decline. I've said it before and I'll say it again, COVID made a lot of people buy computers, they won't be needing another one before a decade.

If you really think 2022 will reproduce the figures of 2020, buckle up, you've got a long wait ahead.

US military contractor moves to buy Israeli spy-tech company NSO Group

"the use of its Pegasus software to crack phones of politicians and campaigners"

Um, let's not forget journalists, shall we ?

Microsoft resorts to Registry hack to keep Outlook from using Windows 11 search

Borkzilla has never understood search

30 years on and Windows Search is still as slow as it was before Y2K.

One wonders what Borkzilla is employing all those programmers for.

Oh, yeah, making useless interface changes and creating new emojis nobody asked for.

You want real, efficient search ? Try Everything.

That is a search tool. It returns results as you type, like a proper program should given the power of today's computers.

Even robots have the right to learn from open source

Let's face it

Borkzilla destroys everything it touches.

Leaked Uber docs reveal frequent use of 'kill switch' to deactivate tech, thwart investigators

"Dawn Raid Manual"

If you work in a company that has that kind of manual, you urgently need to find a job somewhere else.

Uber is the sewer of the business world.

Judge rejects another Microsoft appeal against surplus license reseller suit

"We believe that was both legal and the right thing to do"

Of course you do.

The Court will see if you were right.

Because you didn't ask a lawyer beforehand.

Union tells BT: Commit to pay rise talks next week or else

Re: Proposal for a New Law

Indeed.

If the top cheeto gets a 30% raise when his company is losing money, then everyone gets a 30% raise.

Somehow, that should be enshrined in law.

US floats framework for international crypto regulations that cement its power

I'll just leave this here

DeFlocked

Tech professionals pour cold water on UK crypto hub plans

Oh, and talk about a slapdown

From The Economist linked article :

"This is the politics of fantasy, and you can trace it back to Brexit. In the campaign to leave the European Union Mr Johnson promised voters that they could have everything they wanted—greater wealth, less Europe; more freedom, less regulation; more dynamism, less immigration—and that the eu would be knocking on Britain’s door desperate for a deal. It worked so well that fantasy became the Tories’ organising principle."

Methinks The Economist deserves extra brownie points for a pointed article.

Looks like the Remainers were right after all.

It's starting to come thick and fast

More and more articles that talk about funny money (and blockchain in general) these days are discouraging its use.

That's a Good Thing^TM.

So when can we start laws to ban the monster entirely ?

More and more CS students are interested in AI – and there aren't enough lecturers

"We need to find more people that have a passion for teaching"

Well, we're talking university here, so students are prone to paying attention and not clown around, but it would probably be easier to find teachers if the levels before University had competent teachers and sufficient material and supplies to do the job properly.

A passion for teaching ? Kids growing up in the US are not given the environment to foster that kind of ideal.

COO of failed bio-biz Theranos found guilty on all twelve fraud counts

"nothing has changed"

Of course not. Why slave and toil away when someone is promising you easy riches ?

A new one is born every minute, as they say, and educating them all on the facts of life is well nigh impossible.

Because "there is no such thing as a free lunch" means you actually have to work to get by, and nobody likes that.

Especially when you see TV/YouTube celebrities living large while producing nothing of value to society.

Microsoft rolls back default macro blocks in Office without telling anyone

Typical Borkzilla

Because it's not your computer anymore.

Companies these days have the attention span of goldfish. Oh, a new idea ! Let's implement without thinking about its impact !

And we need to implement agile, because that means we're professionals !

Our society has completely lost the notion of stability and continuity.

I don't see that changing any time soon.

Competition regulators probe Amazon's Marketplace and Microsoft's buy of Activision Blizzard

"if this feeds unfairly into business decisions made by the company's retail tentacle"

I'm going to go waaayy out on a limb here and say : it probably does.

I know of no large, multibillion multinational that actually tries respecting the law before it is crammed down its throat via lawsuit.

Tech world may face huge fines if it doesn't scrub CSAM from encrypted chats

So they've finally found another angle

Seems that backdooring encryption has finally been dropped in the hallowed corridors of power.

So now they just make a law to slap a fine on companies that don't subvert encryption. That's not backdooring, right ? So you can't complain anymore.

Gotta hand it to 'em, they're persistent on this issue.

Too bad they couldn't more persistent on some other things, like the economy.

FBI and MI5 bosses: China cheats and steals at massive scale

"painting China as a threat with false accusations"

There's a laundry list of Chinese nationals caught stealing secrets red-handed that says that those accusations are not entirely false.

Vendors are hiking prices up to 30 percent and claiming 'it's inflation'

Ask for explanations is the best you can do ?

How about "If you don't send me a proper invoice, I'm terminating my contract" ?

Oh, you can't because they've got you by the balls.

What a shame.

Microsoft splits up Windows Beta Channel Insiders

"Previous features may 'disappear' "

Yeah, so may working features that were previously there.

Nexperia talks up its investment in UK wafer fab, says no plans to close

"We're not planning to shut any operations"

Yet.

Operations may be shut, but it won't be planned - promise.

Health trusts swapped patient data for shares in an AI firm. They may have lost millions

Sensyne Health

So, is that a new branch of Theranos ?

Looks like it.

UK tribunal: App Store class action seeking up to $1.8b can continue

"The stage is therefore set for a full trial"

And there will be many, many eyes following that trial.

Pentagon: We'll pay you if you can find a way to hack us

"cybersecurity is a fundamentally human problem"

Indeed.

And I have the feeling that a good step would be a national campaign to tell people to not open attachments from people they don't know.

Apparently, that would cut hacker success by 90%.

US expands efforts to hamstring China’s chipmaking mojo

Re: 46% of the population of Taiwan identify as Mainlanders

Oh really ?

Citation, please.

Actual quantum computers don't exist yet. The cryptography to defeat them may already be here

So, quantum is basically the new fusion

Different types of qubits, you need millions to actually do anything but the best we can do is 5000 and we still don't know how to program them.

177 days to decrypt with 13 thousand qubits ?

I thought this stuff was supposed to be almost instantaneous.

On the contrary, resistance is highly necessary.

AstraLocker ransomware reportedly closes doors to pursue cryptojacking

"only requires the user to enable macros"

No, it requires the user to be a bloody idiot, of which there are obviously quite a lot, otherwise this manner of attack would be dead.

I can't believe how easy it is to not be attacked. Just don't open the fucking attachment.

Near-undetectable malware linked to Russia's Cozy Bear

Cunning ?

Yeah, like I'm going to just open an ISO file from somebody I don't know.

I feel that, when users are going to finally grasp the fact that you do not open attachments from people you don't know, all of these "cunning" attacks are going to become a lot more difficult.

Biden considers removal of Trump-era China tariffs to ease inflation

"the US would lose its leverage"

The mistake is thinking that you have leverage.

Xi Pooh couldn't care less about your leverage.

When you're importing 99% of what you use, you have no leverage.

FedEx signals 'zero mainframe, zero datacenter' operations by 2024

"where it hopes to save an estimated $400 million annually"

So, despite it being already openly stated that cloud does not savo you money, you expect to save not only millions, but hundreds of millions, by going to The Cloud^TM.

I await the follow-up on how you are desperately trying to waive an enormous bill of $700 million.

Good luck.

We need a Library of Congress – but for the digital world

"make stuff do things it was not designed to do"

I disagree.

Hackers cannot make something do a thing it wasn't designed to do.

Hackers make things do something that the original maker did not intend, but included the functionality anyway and didn't think about it.

A hacker cannot make an RPi shoot a laser beam, but he can eventually reprogram it to take over the local network, and maybe access the CCTV records.

A hacker is not a wizard, he's just someone who looks at the equipment available and disregards whatever artificial constraints the maker thought he was imposing.

Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore

Re: Couldn't it just have popped up a nice message

Yeah, but that would be actually thinking about the issue instead of just coding a dead end.

And, if you think about issues, then you actually start to try thinking about solutions.

Borkzilla is not about solutions.

One more question : have you actually tried restoring the backup ?