* Posts by Pascal Monett

16645 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I just checked. The basic model is €6000. For that price, I damn well expect reliability and ease of upgrade/repair.

The model with all the bells and whistles is a full 10 TIMES the price (okay, with over 700GB or DDR4 RAM - who the hell needs 700GB of RAM ???). You can buy a brand new BMW Series 3 Hybrid for that price. If I had the money to buy that and I couldn't maintain it myself with ease, someone would be hanging from a tree.

Digital Ministry merry-go-round set to continue as Nicky Morgan reappointed, made a life peer

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"We were the global leader in outsourcing"

Yeah, and look at how that has left your Government IT. Not really something to brag about. You'd do better to bring stuff back in-house.

Well, it's not like you have a choice anyways, is it ?

In an homage to Harry Potter's every-flavour jelly beans, Microsoft unveils 'Lucky Dip' Windows 10 testing ring

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"this is not so good for those planning deployments"

Windows is not so good for those who want to plan anything beyond the next three weeks.

Your workmates might still be reading that 'unshared' Slack document

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"When you share Snippets and Posts in private channels or message"

You are handing over the information to an entity you have no control over and who is in no way obliged to handle the data in any specific way.

If you think that's a good thing, you're the problem.

Canada's .ca supremo in hot water after cyber-smut stash allegedly found on his work Mac ‒ and three IT bods fired

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: What is it about domain name registries that attracts so much scandal and bad behaviour?

That's actually a very good question. ICANN is the grandfather in this domain, we have Afrinic and now Canada as well.

I'm guessing it's because they don't have all that much to do once the domain names have been approved. So they just sit around all day and wait for something to do, which of course means there is ample time to fool around. And, humans being humans, if they have time to fool around, they will.

Alphabet, Apple, Dell, Tesla, Microsoft exploit child labor to mine cobalt for batteries, human-rights warriors claim

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"claim to have 'voluntary programs' to stop themselves"

I'm sure they do. I have a voluntary program to stop myself from eating too many crisps.

The beauty of the thing is that . . it's voluntary. So when I feel like it, I open my bag of crisps. When I'm done, I subscribe to my voluntary program again.

Simple.

My eyes thank you, Google: Android to get dark mode scheduling in future update

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Dark Mode scheduling"

What is this Dark Mode that they are talking about ? I can't find any Dark Mode in my Galaxy A3 menu. I do have a blue-light filter. I also have a phone that modifies its brightness following the ambient lighting, so why should I need a Dark Mode ?

My phone also has Always On, so I get the time on screen without blasting my middle-of-the-night eyes with the full effect of the unlocked screen. It adjusts its brightness automatically as well - during the day it is nice and readable, in the dark it is subdued and largely readable as well.

So what use is this Dark Mode scheduling to me ? I can't see that it has any.

The National Museum of Computing goes Marie Kondo at Christmas: Luckily all the Lego sparks joy

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

"the Lego was now shipshape and ready for Winter Bytes family events"

So, they'll be back to sort out the Lego again in January I take ? There are worse jobs :)

BTW : brilliant caption on the top pic !

It's 2019 so, of course, this Wells Fargo employee accused of stealing customer cash posed with wads of dosh on Instagram, Facebook

Pascal Monett Silver badge

That's the problem with kids these days, no patience.

No discretion either. It's not because you got out the door with the loot that you can't get caught the week after.

In any case, he won't have any housing issues for the rest of life. That's one form of success, right ?

Deadly 737 Max jets no longer a Boeing concern – for now: Production suspended after biz runs out of parking space

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: I don't believe it was pressure from other aviation authorities

There was pressure. Wikipedia states that first China, then Europe grounded the 737 Max before Trump came out to seal the point.

Basically, he had no choice because everyone else was going to ground the plane anyway, so he just followed the movement.

Stop us if you've heard it before but... Africa's internet management body mired again by corruption allegations

Pascal Monett Silver badge

A right nest of ugly crabs

It would seem that Afrinic resembles a condensed form of everything wrong with people these days. Blatant racism between people of different colors, origins, and now even language.

A new CEO is not going to be enough, everyone should be fired and replaced by people who can actually work together.

What do Nginx, Twitch... and the English Premier League have in common? Russians. It's always the Russians

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

Wait a minute

"all of which are stored on servers outside of Russia. No other products are developed within Russia."

So let me get this straight : this is a Russian company, developing software in Russian for Russians, and they store all their builds on servers that are not in Russia ?

Are they afraid that Putin is going to march in with a cohort of Stormtroopers and demand they hand over their code ?

I get that you can store anything almost anywhere these days, but they say don't have a single line of code residing anywhere in Russia. That's weird.

Where's our data, Google? Chrome 79 update 'a catastrophe' for Android devs with WebView apps

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Indeed. You're a company and the only record you have is bloody phone ?

Well now you know why you shouldn't work like that.

Chinese e-commerce site LightInTheBox.com bared 1.3TB of server logs, user data and more

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Just wonderful

I had a feeling that it had been a while since we'd had a billion-record breach. Just one question : is this going to be the last one of the year ? Maybe not.

Oh well, at least the company can rest easy knowing that there will be no GDPR fine, right ?

Warnings over emotional AIs, OpenAI explains how it became video-game king, plus ML climate impact probe

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"probably racked up tens of millions of dollars in computing costs"

I'm guessing that they used cloud compute - it's not specified clearly int he article (or I missed where it was). If compute intensity is that high, wouldn't it be better to buy the equipment and use that ? If you have tens of millions in cost of execution, surely it cannot be worse to buy your own and then just pay the electricity ?

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Quality ?

Their only quality is that they semi-prevent the drawer from being opened when it is "locked".

A while ago I was consulting in a company that worked with vast open space offices. We're talking a hundred people in the same room, working on a hundred desks. I was obviously told, on my first day, that the desk had to be clean every evening - papers (and valuables) were to be put in the drawers.

I settled in and my neighbor wasted no time in getting me up to speed on the clean desk policy. It would seem that it was common knowledge that there were only three different lock types, meaning the key on my drawer could open at least a third of all desks present. On top of that, he showed me a trick to get the top drawer open : some desks didn't have the desktop strongly fitted to the drawer section, and if you could lift it just a few millimeters, you could just slide the top drawer open like that.

I dutifully put my papers in the desk, but my personal belongings stayed with me for the duration of that contract.

Admins sigh as Microsoft pushes Teams changes – let everyone play!

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"allows existing AAD users in your organization [..] to initiate a trial of the product."

Because we are going to ram this baby down your throat whether you like it or not. And that is why we activated this ability before giving you the possibility of locking it down.

Possibility which will unfortunately have a hiccup in a future patch Tuesday, unlocking user access once again and taking into account ever user who asked and was blocked by the setting that will unfortunately be reset.

Because we can.

Valuable personal info leaks from Facebook – not Zuck selling it, unencrypted hard drives of staff data stolen

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Oh it is very secure - if you are a governmental body trying to find out how it works, you will observe the hardest brick wall you have ever seen.

The problem here is that the hard drive was not under House Commission scrutiny. If it had been, you couldn't have gotten to it with a tank.

Xbox Series X: Gee thanks, Microsoft! Just what we wanted for Xmas 2020 – a Gateway tower PC

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So, it's a PC, right ?

It's a tower, and if you open it up I'd wager you'll find a microATX motherboard, a regular AMD video card and the usual components connected to said motherboard.

The one thing that may change is the way the OS is configured, locking you down to the Microsoft Store and only giving you the gaming options.

I wonder if you could install Linux on it. I also wonder why you would want to.

GlaxoSmithKline ditches IR35 contractors: Go PAYE or go home

Pascal Monett Silver badge

A planet where a promise should be made good ? They didn't vote to get something, they voted because they were promised something. It is normal that said promise be fulfilled.

Well, normal to an idiot like me, that is. I'm not a politician.

Iran says it staved off cyber attack but doesn't blame US

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well, unplugging from the Internet is just about the most absolute defense you can have.

Cops storm Nginx's Moscow offices after a Russian biz claims it owns world's most widely used web server, not F5

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"He claims he wrote the software in his spare time"

If he wrote it on his home machine, then fine, but if he wrote it on company hardware, then sorry, but it belongs to the company.

Are you writing code for ambient computing? No? Don't even know? Ch-uh. Google's 'write once, run anywhere' Flutter is all over it

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Don't worry, it's our privacy that's going to lose, as usual.

OK. We're off. Water ice found just below the surface of Mars. Good enough for us. Let's go. Impulse power, Mr Sulu

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Arcadia Planitia [..] has [..] a thicker atmosphere"

Hang on, how can a single part of a planet have a thicker atmosphere then anywhere else ? What is left of the Martian atmosphere is already tenuous, how can a small part of it be measurably thicker for a long period of time ?

NPM swats path traversal bug that lets evil packages modify, steal files. That's bad for JavaScript crypto-wallets

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Which is why I only use browsers that have an add-on that can block JS from executing. When I use Chrome (which I have to for business reasons), it is only to go to a very limited selection of sites.

I only allow JS to execute on sites I trust. The others can go fudge themselves.

Ever wonder how hackers could possibly pwn power plants? Here are 54 Siemens bugs that could explain things

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So reassuring

"Both highways should not be exposed if the environment has been set up according to the recommended system configuration in the Siemens SPPA-T3000 security manual."

Given how often certified electricians can apparently get it wrong when wiring potentially deadly electrical outlets, I'm not sure that Siemens' recommendations are followed as much as we would all like them to be.

I would be grateful for a rebuttal on that.

100 mysterious blinking lights in the night sky could be evidence of alien life... or something weird, say boffins

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Remember : it's never aliens

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Time for a SWAB link again ....

That was a great read, thank you for the reference !

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Not just a wall socket

We changed house at the end of 2017. The previous owner of our new house was - apparently - an engineer, and had a (very) high opinion of himself. He even bragged about having done all the electrical stuff himself. When we moved in, we discovered a few quirks that we had not noticed before, notably a slight buzzing sound in the ceiling of the entry hallway. We didn't make much of it at the time, it wasn't loud enough to be annoying.

Some time in 2018 we discovered that the electric heaters in one room were defective and needed replacing (not something you notice when visiting in the summer). So we shopped around for replacements and found something to our liking, which we got installed in August. When the installer came, he asked to look at the electrical cabinet. I showed it to him and, on opening the panel, I saw his expression change. He looked at me and said "Sir, I cannot install your heaters with this mess. I'm going to have to redo your panel entirely."

He explained carefully and clearly why the existing installation was not only defective and obsolete, but could very well be source of serious trouble (ie a fire). I obviously gave him permission to do everything he thought necessary.

Once everything was cleared up and the heaters installed, the buzzing had disappeared in the entry hallway.

It would appear that the previous owner was less competent than he thought.

Oracle leaves its heart in San Francisco – or it would do if, you know, Oracle had a heart

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"poor street conditions"

So it smells of hobo piss there as well ?

In 2016, for my daughter's 20th, we went to the USA to show her the places her daddy grew up and around. Of course, passing by Los Angeles, we toured Hollywood Boulevard.

It stinks of piss. Every tree is "watered" all night long, and in the morning there are repeated heaps of snoring blankets every few yards. It's sad.

If San Francisco is going the same way, I'm not surprised Oracle is pulling out. As shitty as Oracle is, that is competition it cannot hold up against.

Non-unicorn $700 e-scooter shop Unicorn folds with no refunds – after blowing all its cash on online ads

Pascal Monett Silver badge

smartphone-enabled locking

Of all the stupid things to include, that takes the cake alongside integrated GPS.

Just put a cradle on the handlebar to hold the phone the user already has that has GPS in it already. Add wireless charging to it since you're selling to the hipsters.

As far as locking, a nice, solid, physical lock is the only solution.

It's a billion-ton, 14-million-mile long mysterious alien formation – and Earth is heading right into it

Pascal Monett Silver badge

“Something catastrophic [must have] happened to Phaethon a couple of thousand years ago"

If it was catastrophic, it must have changed Phaethon's orbit, right ? I'm thinking impact.

If Phaethon had an impact with something where the Geminid cloud is, then I would think that it does not go through that area now. Is that the case ?

Because if Phaethon is still going through that area now, then whatever happened was not catastrophic enough to change its orbit. Then what ?

Hey Dixons, you know what's mobile? Your rapidly shrinking sales

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Ah, ERP again

Two large companies merge, two different ERP systems exist. There can be only one.

Right there is millions, if not tens of millions, of investment thrown out the window. Plus millions more making the side whose ERP is not kept adapt to the new system. With the inevitable remarks of "hey, we can't do [thing] anymore, how dumb is that ?".

Plus a few more million adapting the remaining ERP to the new company configuration.

All that for a group that is on the decline. Was merging such a good idea, or is it just better to fail together instead of alone ?

Disgrace of Base: Scammy hordes force Keybase to end cryptocoin giveaway

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"they got to experience what it was like"

It seems astonishing that companies these days still act like the Internet is 1995, then get all surprised when it becomes clear that, no, the Internet is full of assholes and if you want to have customers, you need to implement the means to deal with said assholes.

It's not news, people. Wake up.

It's time you were T0RTT a lesson: Here's how you could build a better Tor, say boffins

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Depends on how much you value your privacy.

ERP disaster zone: The mostly costly failures of the past decade

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Can ERP actually be a perfect fit for any company ?

Take an off-the-shelf solution and you're going to customize it. Sorry, no company is going to change its structure to fit a program, whatever the promises are.

Make your own ERP and you foot the entire bill all the way, plus whatever changes need to be made to fit the changes of the company. And you have no support from anyone, you have to make do with the resources you have in-house. Good for whoever is in charge of the programming, not so good for the company in the long run.

I can't see that there's a good choice there. Maybe it's better to go with individual products that do one thing well, and arrange for software to tie them loosely together. Might seem clunky, but it is modular so easier and cheaper to deal with. Maybe.

Microsoft movie tried to Azure Ignite attendees about CPU side-channel flaws, but biz wouldn't be drawn on details

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"We could never ever put our customers at risk"

Bold words. Especially when, just a few paragraphs later, it is said that no, Azure does not turn off hyperthreading. You can talk mitigations 'till the pigeons come home to roost, you're putting your clients at risk.

That being said, and my having already stated that I cannot, for the life of me, turn off hyperthreading, I'm wondering just exactly how much of a risk it really is. Is an Azure server always a Windows platform ? If it is Linux, that's already a lot of malware that is ineffective. Is there an actual exploit in the wild, being used at this time ?

I'm not saying that the side-channel attack is a figment of imagination, I'm just wondering how easy it is to actually implement and get data out of from a hacker's point of view.

Colorado cryptocoin execs spark up blunt '$722m ponzi scheme' criminal charges after investments go up in smoke

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

How is it possible

With all that has been said about virtual currencies, how is it possible that people are gullible enough to fork over real money in order to "invest" in funny money.

If you're dealing in nonsense money, you do not sell shares, you give a mining program and tell people to download it and run it. That is the only form of investment that is required.

Anything else and you should just call the cops and keep 'em talking.

You cannae break the laws of physics, cap'n... Boffins call BS on 'impossible' black hole, fear readings were botched

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Time to refer to Feynman again

And post his explanation of how to build scientific theory.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Time for a kicking

I don't think it was a basic error. It seems that it was an honest mistake made by misinterpreting what a given data variation meant.

Personally, I've already a hard time understanding what exactly the error is, so I find it understandable that the initial authors made the mistake.

Capita lights One Revenues and Benefits bug bonfire: ALL reports older than 12 months to be ignored

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"we are saying they will not be fixed"

To which the proper response should be : we're not saying you're wrong, we're saying you will not be paid until they are fixed.

Why does nobody have the balls to do that ? Because nobody's going to do that.

LightAnchors array: LEDs in routers, power strips, and more, can sneakily ship data to this smartphone app

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Yes, but for what?

For blinking ads at us on our phones, of course.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: That can't convey any useful info.

It conveys the position in the transmission. If the phone captures the end bits, it knows to wait for the next transmission.

It's important because the phone cannot connect to the LED to ask it for its data.

Scientists use machine-learning algorithms to map out 10 billion cells from human bodies in fight against cancer

Pascal Monett Silver badge

In any case, this is a Good Thing (TM)

I'm glad to hear that statistical analysis machines are being put to uses other than comparing my face to a terrorist database.

And who knows, this might help with the fight against cancer, or even more stuff.

Go science !

Google Chrome will check for leaked credentials every time you sign in anywhere

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

"you have to sign into Chrome"

Yup, well that's that, then.

Not gonna happen, ever. Google has enough data on me as it is without me handing it over on a silver platter.

Microsoft's Teams goes to bat for the other team with preview on Linux

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"There is no escape from collaboration"

Unless you're name is Wunderlist.

Huawei 5G kit in Faroe Islands: Chinese ambassador 'linked Huawei contract to ... trade deal' – report

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Actually, it's a situation in the same vein as an episode of Yes Minister, except that in that episode they managed to have the interview suppressed.

So I consider myself vindicated when I said that Yes Minister was a documentary.

Boffins find proof that yes, Carl Sagan and Joni Mitchell were right, we really are all made up of star stuff

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Thank you for clearing that up for me.

Bad news: KeyWe Smart Lock is easily bypassed and can't be fixed

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

As usual, "smart" is anything but

Ok, fine, you'd need to know how to use Wireshark, which is probably not on the list of abilities of every thief in the area, but still, this is just one more thing to add to the ever-growing list of things IoT has promised and not kept in Real Life (TM).

A bog-standard lock may not be the right solution to protect a front door, but a good, 5-point security lock is.

And you don't need to worry about the state of the batteries.

With a warehouse of unsold AR goggles, Magic Leap has a brainwave… let’s rebadge ‘em and sell to business!

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Good article

And good blog reference as well. I will refer people to this article in the future when asked my opinion about current VR technology.