* Posts by Pascal Monett

16645 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Palantir: Never made a profit, we do something with family-separating ICE, we just lost $580m – please join our IPO

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

So the company never made a profit

Yet the bosses allocate themselves a million a month. Including a billionaire who doesn't need the money.

If you think I'm investing in that, I have a bridge to sell you.

'There is no way we can keep coding local': GitPod's cloud development platform released into sunlight of open source

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Trollface

"a platform that enables developers to create cloud-hosted development environments"

So we've now started creating Russian Doll IDEs ?

Conflict of interest? We've heard of it. Amazon on selection panel to choose UK.gov's chief digi officer

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

“highly inappropriate”

Oh, come now, we all know that this is inevitable. Amazon is just taking its rightful place in the government wheels. Place which will allow it to better serve the public, right ?

I mean, hey, multi-billion dollar corporations have been wining and dining lobbying government officials since their first billion, so why not get real and give them a seat at the decision table ?

It's not like there are any government officials who have the balls to send them packing anyway. They need those sweet retirement gigs.

The truth is, honest people need willpower to cheat, while cheaters need it to be honest

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"moral default"

Does this mean that they have developed an MRI-defined method of determining if someone is basically honest, or basically a cheater ?

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Where to from here?

Agreed. It is good to learn that the Scottish Wiki editor is not Scottish, but it is no use banging on his head for the problem. The real problem is that there are no Scottish people editing the Scottish wiki.

Get some real Scots on there and the problem will solve itself. And if no Scots can be bothered, then maybe it isn't a problem.

Adobe yanks freebie Creative Cloud offer – now universities and colleges have to put up or shut up

Pascal Monett Silver badge

“Universities where Adobe is not core will get a lot more focused”

Yep, indeed : focused on alternatives that cost less, even if they're not as good.

Maybe this push by Adobe is going to incite other vendors to up their game a bit. Adobe has always had a near-monopoly with Photoshop, even forcing its clients to the Could didn't put a dent in its user base, although teeth were grinding loudly.

That's because there is no product that can compete with Adobe on features, Photoshop is just king of the hill.

And Adobe pushes that as far as it can (in the interest of its shareholders, of course).

Apple coughs $84m to settle South Korean market abuse case

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

What cheek

"[Apple] insisted that local carriers foot the bill for advertising and fixing under-warranty iThings "

What nerve. If the iThings are under warranty, they are your responsibility, Apple, and no one else's. I am frankly appaled at the idea that the carriers didn't tell Cupertino to stuff it, accompanied by a vast ad campaign telling the public what Apple had demanded and why they had refused.

Public opinion can be useful. I doubt very much that South Koreans would have appreciated that Apple was trying to force someone else to bear the costs of Apple's warranty.

North Korean hackers pwned cryptocurrency sysadmin with GDPR-themed LinkedIn lure, says F-Secure

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FAIL

Enable Content

You have to be a boob to go and enable content just to read a Word document. Whatever is enabled is just links and code, the actual content of the document does not need enabling to read it. On top of that, whatever links may be embedded generally pertain to the author's network, and you haven't a snowball's chance in Hell of being able to access it. So the only thing you'd be enabling is code you don't know.

And this was a sysadmin <facepalm>.

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

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Re: it's infamous need to be rebuilt literally every couple of months

I counted. I have reinstalled Win98SE a grand total of 312 times. And that, only on my computer. I have also reinstalled it dozens of times on other people's computers.

XP was truly an Operating System. It worked for weeks at a time (well, my memories are mostly about SP3, so there may be some bias there), had one or two orders of magnitude less BSODs, and was fun to use (ie it didn't get in the way of what you wanted to do). Of course, it had the godawful Registry, but that was its worst point.

Win 7/64 is, for me, the best MS OS. It'll be Mint after that.

The Viking Snowden: Denmark spy chief 'relieved of duty' after whistleblower reveals illegal snooping on citizens

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Re: Corruption,... again

It is true that there has recently been a tsunami of people abusing their power and status, and brazenly denying anything wrong even in the face of overwhelming proof (no, I'm not just thinking of the OHSG).

That being said, it is hardly new. ICANN has been trailblazing on that front for more than a decade now, and nothing appears to be stopping it. On the contrary, it has clearly spawned admirers (eh, Pai ?).

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"it's the new version of Firefox for Android"

From what I read here and in the comments, it will also be the last version of Firefox for Android, because everyone is going to move to something else.

No back button ? WTF ?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Unfortunate ...

Try Brave, you'll thank me.

Fusion boffins apply plasma know-how to building thrusters

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Thumb Up

YES !

Imperial Star Destroyer thrusters, here we come !

Well done on finally having fusion that works. That is why we must continue research in fusion, you never know what it can end up being applied to.

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

Another great Microsoft idea

Central recording and retention of chats. Brilliant. That way, you get problems like this.

Why is it that humans, in general, absolutely want to treat every platform like a data store ? Chat has one use : to contact someone that has the answer to the problem you have NOW, get the answer and solve your problem. The chat window is only useful up to the moment you have that info. Once you're done implementing the info, you close the chat window and it is of no use to you any more.

If you absolutely want to keep that chat for reference purposes, every chat tool I have ever used allows you to save the thread, but once you close the window, the chat is gone.

And that's the way it should be.

Accenture scores £20m contract extension with UK pensions department: Competition? We've heard of it

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Is it just me ?

"The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has handed Accenture a £20m contract extension, without outside competition, to try to keep some seriously ageing applications and infrastructure running. "

Or does anyone else have an intense feeling of déjà vu when reading that first sentence ?

I started reading that and could almost finish it before I was halfway through. I have the feeling that I've already read that exact same sentence ten times this year.

Oh, DWP, you have a "long established procurement process" ? Yup, and we can all see how it works : you choose the vendor you're already working with and throw more money at it.

Uncle Sam to blow millions on getting fusion power finally working – with the help of AI

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Re: Fusion reactor safe?!!!!

That article is one hell of a wet blanket on my fusion enthusiasm. If what he says is true, we're better off with thorium reactors.

India's contact-tracing app grows an API to share health status info with businesses

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So, if I understand correctly, now companies in India will check the COVID status of consultants that need to come in and do stuff the company needs and, if the result is not good, the consultant cannot come.

Which means the work won't be done, or at least, not by that guy.

It might look like a good idea on the surface, but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

TikTok takes to the courts to challenge US ban

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Re: Trump hs shown distain for the courts

Trump shows disdain for everyone and everything who do not blindly agree with everything he says or do not get down on their knees to kiss his fat ass when he decides that's what he wants.

Crack this mystery: Something rotated the ice shell around Jupiter's Europa millions of years ago, fracturing it

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Re: leaving little or no trace visible on the surface

Not sure of that. If we imagine a round-ish meteor punching a hole in the surface ice, the melt would clearly outline a circle and the interior would be noticeably smoother than the region around it.

Might take a bit of time to spot, but I think it would be quite visible once you've found it.

Google says Australian pay-for-news code means it can’t quit the country

Pascal Monett Silver badge

28 days ?

Isn't that a bit long for "advance notice of algorithm changes" ?

I perfectly agree with Australia's desire to see news outlets get their fair share - which Google has never worried about until now - and I totally support any effort that reigns in this out-of-control behemoth that does whatever it feels like and whines like a child when someone steps up to curb the rampant tracking and broken ad system, but this is the age of Internet and near-instantaneous worldwide communication.

28 days of notice is a perfectly administrative mindset defined by people who do nothing but talk all day long, then agree to meet tomorrow to talk some more. If we admit that an advance notification is useful and necessary, then we also have to admit that five working days is more than enough time to get the notification, read it, understand the impact and explain to the higher-ups.

Especially since Google is just notifying, there's no acceptance to be had. So basically Google could just make a web page listing the changes, send the notification and implement the changes. Why wait ?

Then the page could serve as an ongoing log of what changes Google made, and that would become historical reference at the same time.

Good enough.

‘IT professionals increasingly define themselves by capabilities they excel at managing’ says Atlassian chap

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Not surprising

It is hardly surprising that this Stame is a high-ranking manager, he's got the knack for not saying anything useful in more than enough words.

He also manages to contradict himself when he says that IT workers no longer define themselves by the product they're good at but by the skills they have, then goes on to say that they refer to themselves as AWS or Azure specialists.

He calls himself a strategist, but he has clearly been working more on the sales side of the business.

No wonder he can spout so much bull without thinking.

Utes gotta be kidding me... University of Utah handed $457K to ransomware creeps

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Re: Utah Retard School

Exactly. The school did not choose to pay to not let the information out, the school chose the pay-and-pray-they'll-keep-their-word option.

You're dealing with criminals, their word is a good as their deed.

On the other hand, from a marketing point of view, it's bad for business if you hack someone, get the ransom and then let them hang. So I guess the hackers are kind of forced to keep their word because if hackers are known to screw you once you've paid, there would be zero incentive to pay, right ?

So long, Top Gun... AI software waxes US F-16 pilot's tail 5-0 during virtual dogfight drills

Pascal Monett Silver badge

They do that on attack choppers all the time. The Apache had a forward gun controlled by where the pilot (or gunner - don't remember specifically which) was looking, not where the chopper was pointed.

But a helicopter doesn't go supersonic, and dogfight tradition is you point the plane. It was rather successful in both world wars.

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Why ? Did you leave the disc out in the sun ?

I still have the first CDs I burned way back in 2003 and they, as well as all the rest of the optical discs I have ever burned, are perfectly readable.

Of course, I always activate verify after burning.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: nothing can replace careful software engineering

And that's the problem, nothing has replaced it.

But apparently nobody is doing careful software engineering anymore (except NASA, and even they screw up sometimes).

Pascal Monett Silver badge

And that is how most people learn the value of backups - through a painful experience.

And some, not even then.

Adobe has just given two essential lessons to its customers :

1) wait for others to install the upgrade to learn if something goes wrong

2) always backup your important data to some other type of media that you can store off the network

You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: With great power comes great incompatibility

No reason to change the wall sockets. You label the existing ones, and explain to the cleaner very clearly which sockets he can use.

If it happens again, you change the cleaner.

They're 'clean': SoftBank gets thumbs-up from Uncle Sam for keeping Chinese gear off its Japanese 5G network

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Thumb Up

I second that motion

Let's have an EU Clean Network program, where no piece of equipment is beholden to any foreign state government. So it'll have to be Ericsson everywhere, I guess.

Oh, and can we please get rid of NSA listening posts on our side of international fiber links ?

Microsoft nudges latest TypeScript iteration out onto the mean streets of JavaScript

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"those cursed to support old versions of Internet Explorer and Safari"

That would be enterprise-internal stuff and they won't update anyway, it's been ages since you cannot update anything IE6-related because that will just end the application.

On the web these days, the mantra is Use An Up To Date Browser, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Bunch of mugs keep risking life and limb to 'crockery bomb' sad little roundabout

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Where is the danger ?

Honestly, where ?

Do traffic laws in Britain mandate that one drives through the roundabout ? I don't have a British driver's license, but somehow I think they teach you to drive around the middle, just like in every other country.

The picture speaks for itself : there aren't all that many cars and the roundabout isle itself is barren. You can easily drive your car onto it, get out without bothering traffic at all or putting yourself into any sort of danger (unless there's a spy chase barreling down on you - then all bets are off and you're probably dead even if you weren't in the middle of the road), set your mugs artfully and then drive off without any trouble.

Especially if you have the help of a spotter who tells you when the road is free to get back on.

Sure, I understand that it is not something any municipal counsel is actually supposed to condone, but from there to cautioning people about danger, come on.

You could put a lounge chair in the middle and set yourself up with a table, a glass, an ice bucket with a nice bottle of Claret and a book and spend a marvelous afternoon. With a parasol if the sun is a mite hot. The only problem you'll risk is that of a police officer coming to get rid of you.

Experian says it recovered and deleted data on 24 million South Africans after giving it to random 'marketing' person

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Thumb Down

I think Experian has had enough chances

It has been foul-up after foul-up.

Experian is itself a threat to people's privacy and financial safety.

Enough is enough. It's time to just shut it down.

Worldwide Google services – from GCP to G Suite – hit with the outage stick

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Oh my, Google Cloud and Slack at the same time

It seems that all this cloudy stuff is really, really hard to keep working.

We used to talk about five nines availability - seems like that's last millennium's history.

Backup a sec – is hard drive reliability improving? Annual failure rate from Backblaze comes in at its lowest yet

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Re: Not solid research

It may not be solid research, but it's still more significant than personal experience (including mine). Not many companies use that many drives, so it's nice of Backblaze to publish the figures they have.

And they're not saying it's research. They're doing everyone a courtesy.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: care to share?

Well my personal stats are four 3TB WD NAS drives that have been functioning flawlessly for over five years now, plus a 2TB WD drive in my main PC that has worked every day since 2013 and is still going strong.

Of course, my main PC also has a 3TB Seagate that has been functioning without a hitch since 2015, so I'm a bit on the fence here.

Nvidia's data centre biz tops gaming as lead revenue source – and it should enjoy being king while it lasts

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

"how many people around the world are depending on gaming at home”

Um, isn't that a bit exaggerated ? There may be more people gaming right now because of the current situation, but a lot of them are out of a job, so if they are depending on anything, it's on a chance to get another paycheck.

I'm glad that you are doing well, I have long been a customer and your products are good, but let's not lose our heads over what you do : you sell graphics cards and specialized GPU processors for data centers. You do not support our lifestyle, nor are you a cornerstone of our lives.

Don't try and make us believe that you are helping us get through these trying times. You're profiting from this situation (in an honorable way), that's all.

Nominet promises .uk owners it'll listen to feedback on plan to award itself millions... as long as it agrees with it

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Nominet is copying ICANN

"the board has stopped publishing minutes and reports, and refuses to break out the different businesses in financial reports "

I just checked out Nominet's Board page and found that, apart from the two youngest members (who apparently haven't had the time yet), all of them are affiliated with PwC, ICANN or HP. Most of the oldest are also on other boards.

Obviously, they have forgotten the job they are supposed to do, and decided that, like ICANN, they have a structure and a market at their disposal, and they are going to make the most of it.

This is the UK, obviously, but I wonder how many of these sleazebags would be Republicans of it were the USA.

Marketing: Wow, that LD8 data centre outage was crazy bad. Still, can't get worse, can it? Finance: HOLD MY BEER

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Issues are piling up

A technical glitch can happen to anyone, we all know that.

But to invoice your customers because they were asking you to check on their status is pushing things too far.

Such behavior can only mean that Equinix is a company that is searching for every penny it can possibly scrape, which doesn't mean good things for hardware maintenance or employee proficiency.

50%+ of our office seats are going remote, say majority of surveyed Register readers. Hi security, bye on-prem

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I rather like the current situation

Not COVID, of course, but freelancing from home. Also there's the fact that I have a 1GB fiber connection and an office to take advantage of it.

But what I really like is the fact that my customers - with one exception - aren't even dreaming of asking me to come in to their office to work. All (but one) of my customers are contacting me by phone or mail to ask if I can log in and do something for them. Instead of a 45-minute commute on crowded highways, followed by a good 10 to 15 minutes hunting for a parking space, I'm logged in and ready to work inside of ten minutes.

If this remote working situation endures, I will be quite satisfied.

While the world pushes back against COVID-19, Facebook has a pandemic of a different sort – medical misinformation

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Facepalm

"Facebook's strategies are falling short of what is needed to effectively protect society."

Gosh. What a surprise.

I never would have thought. A multinational corporation that lives on ads delivered by clicks is not doing enough to stop successful pages that disseminate false information.

Who'd've thought ?

SQLite maximum database size increased to 281TB – but will anyone need one that big?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: How is that possible ?

Um, if you don't need to refer to a table in a relational database, then what's the use of having it ?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

How is that possible ?

"This is a bug, but by the time the problem was discovered there where so many databases in circulation that depended on the bug that the decision was made to support the bugging behavior moving forward, "

I will readily admit that I'm no database administrator, but even I know that there is always supposed to be a primary key. How on Earth did not only someone find a way to need null primary keys, but more than one someone did too, to such numbers that it is now a feature ?

Could someone explain that to me ? I'm really curious to know.

Not now, Gartner. We've had enough of the future to last a lifetime: Meet 'Formative AI' and 'Algorithmic Trust'

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Flame

Digital Me

Another damned excuse to slurp all my data without my consent.

How to have a more positive 'outage experience' according to Microsoft: Please don't rely on the Azure Status page

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: What a great way to blame the customer for problems

Indeed, I was absolutely not criticizing El Reg for the article, I was bashing the MS spokesdrone for what was being said.

I should have been clearer. Now that I re-read myself after a day, I realize that confusion is possible.

Sorry for that.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

What a great way to blame the customer for problems

"Outages are 'an unfortunate inevitability of the technology industry' "

The Cloud (TM) is sold as being always on, always there, so you have no right to make that argument.

""Azure has operated core compute services at 99.995% average uptime across our global cloud infrastructure "

So you're boasting about the fact that you've got 4 nines performance when you sell at five nines and, on top of that, you're talking about how your cores are functioning, not about how reliably your customers are accessing said cores.

"more than 95 per cent of our incidents" do not appear there

Then your Status page is worthless and you should do better. A Status page that only says there's a problem when every single customer can see that there's a problem is just a cover-up.

there is a separate Azure DevOps status page

Which proves that there is a cover-up. If you have to separate your failure warnings over multiple web sites, you're just diluting the information willfully.

And this last one is a beaut : "reliability is a shared responsibility"

Not when you're making your customers pay for said reliability.

This entire piece is just a "it's your fault, we're doing everything we can" puff piece.

Despicable.

Securus sued for 'recording attorney-client jail calls, handing them to cops' – months after settling similar lawsuit

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Indeed, it would appear that I missed that. Thanks for the heads-up.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Well done to the cop

The ones suing are three defense lawyers. The only mention of cops in the article is to say that they obtained illegal recordings.

And, if they obtained them, they used them. What is not said is if the cops knew the recordings were illegal, although I bet listening to the recordings should make it pretty clear.

Trump backs Oracle as potential TikTok buyer

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Oracle and Ellison are more evil than the Chinese government

And being praised by the OHSG is just the nail in the coffin.

Cloud now bigger than Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Cisco combined

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

So the numbers are in

Everyone is going to The Cloud (TM) and, lo and behold !, now The Cloud (TM) is where the big money is being made.

What a surprise. Not.

Cloud evangelists have been pushing us in that direction for at least a decade already. It's no surprise that, with the largest multinational corporations throwing tens of billions into The Cloud (TM) and refining their offerings every year, that money is to be made there.

We're back to the mainframe server paradigm of the 70s and 80s, except that now, the mainframe belongs to someone else, you only get a slice of it, you can't discuss conditions and, when your link goes down for whatever reason, you can only wait for the mainframe operator to resolve the issue. Oh, and if you have trouble, a million other people probably do as well.

Yay progress.

Amazon makes 850,000m2 bet that its people will get off the kitchen table and back to an office

Pascal Monett Silver badge

1 in 6 corporate positions ?

You'd think a guy like Bezos who apparently hates paying his employees would have less overhead.

Outage: Faulty UPS at data centre housing London Internet Exchange causes grief for ISPs and telcos alike

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"to provide the sense of scale of this outage"

That 150 companies are affected provides absolutely no sense of scale unless you know how many companies there are in total.

I do not. Is it 150 out of 300 ? That would be important. Is it 150 out of 10,000 ? That would be marginally insignificant.

So which is it ?