* Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

2711 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Meh

3rd-line support

i.e. supposed to be at least slightly aware of How Things Work. One of my "most experienced" co-workers, upon receiving an SOS from first-line support citing hundreds of complains about an expired certificate preventing access to a critical online application, insisted on getting an answer to "is it reproducible with another browser?" and would not act upon it before getting said answer. As everyone knew, strictly enforced company policy was that no other browser than MSIE could be installed on end-user machines. When I got in I simply asked the Big Cheese for this application to check their certificates, which got the issue solved in a little less than an hour (yes, they had forgotten to renew the certificate).

We lost half a day of worldwide productivity on this one. The person responsible for the cockup got promoted, altough they apparently didn't do too well in their new role and got downgraded a few month later. Karma, I guess.

RIP 2019-2019: The first plant to grow on the Moon? Yeah, it's dead already, Chinese admit

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Bad planning

Stick May and Corbyn in a car, Musk already knows how to fling it into space. But what if the OP hypothesis was correct, and May could survive in the cold, friendless darkness on the far side of the moon?

The really frightening hypothesis would be them both surviving, and in the loneliness and the long, long nights, one thing leading to another... well, I'm sure you get the idea. We might want to get ready to nuke the moon from orbit . Only way to be sure, all that sort of things.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Puzzled

Well they did put a temperature regulator in there, although perhaps not a good enough one -must resist the AliBaba joke.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

The experiment is rather more complex

Than just sprouting seeds. Setting up a functionnal micro-ecosystem is non-trivial even on Earth. I am not privy to the details, but I can only guess that the Unis have done some extensive research / testing down here before sending the cannister moonward, and that they will keep monitoring the experiment to see what happens to the other seeds, the flies , the yeast etc

This all seems worthy research to me.

(Of course there is a publicity angle, too, but in our world publicity is how you get funding for research, and not only in China)

US comms watchdog's industry-friendly 5G rules challenged by fresh legislation

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: $270/year?!

Due to the density needed, a lot of the sites are expected to be on existing urban structures (lamp posts and the likes), which are local authority property; that means increased maintenance costs for the municipality.

US prosecutors: Hey, you know how we said 'net gambling was OK? LMAO, we were wrong

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Why?!

Gambling gains surely, as opposed to profits made by the gambling house ?

In northern America there are exemptions for the "first nations" but I was unaware of anything similar in the UK.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Why?!

Tobacco and alcohol suddently spring to mind ..?

IBM to kill off Watson... Workspace from end of February

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Sametime viable ?

Well, there's Skype's horrendous interface that makes sure to waste as much screen space as possible in brightly-coloured patches, so that the actual useful content is nearly impossible to get to, the appaling handling of group chat, the absence of a "add history" option when adding a new participant, etc...

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Sametime viable ?

Well, SameTime is way better than Skype For Business in a lot of ways, especially for collaborative work (as opposed to iddle chatter with Monique from Accounts over the cafeteria menu, for which Skype is quite appropriate).

China's really cotton'd on to this whole Moon exploration thing: First seed sprouts in lunar lander biosphere

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Just a PR stunt

Having a seed sprout in a sealed box is not that difficult, even if the box is on the Moon.

That may or may not be true: root developpment is in part driven by gravity, in different ways depending on the species. Even only a couple weeks of observations could provide valuable data.

FCC's answer to scandal of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile US selling people's location data: Burying its head in the ground

ElReg!comments!Pierre

To be honest the shutdown is a pretty good excuse

Sure, the Ajit is abusing it in bad faith, and he would have found another one uf needed, but the shutdown does play nucely i to his hand.

In fact, perhaps paralyzing governmental bodies and getting their employees to resign massively (in order to get a paid job and foot the bills, buy food etc) was really yhe Donald's hidden goal all along ?

The D in SystemD stands for Dammmit... Security holes found in much-adored Linux toolkit

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Devuan user here

Mostly Devuan too, here, appart from a couple Debian machines that I didnt take the time to remove systemd from yet. Must really get to it!

Staff sacked after security sees 'suspect surfer' script of shame

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Access Denied

T'was the 90s. Besides, even now with the block-everything-till-someones-fills-the-paperwork approach, the blocked URL will still show up in the logs, even though you won't access the page ("The website you are trying to access contains freeware, shareware or open source software and has been blocked. If your work require material from this page, please fill the form at [link] to have the page* unblocked. Be informed that your manager will be asked to approve your request." ; better not need to review that patch on github anytime soom then)

*yes, 'page', not 'website'

It's beginning to look a lot like multi-threaded CPUs, everywhere you go... Arm teases SMT Cortex-A65AE car brains

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Joke

Re: Automotive enhanced ?

Autobahn near Karlsruhe[...] while [...] overtaking a long line of lorries at 85mph.

Which begs the obvious question: why were you doing only 85mph on the Autobahn; was your car broken, or American, or something?

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Mushroom

Re: Automotive enhanced ?

ARM now being a design-only business, the security measures listed are a bit pointless since it is left to the manufacturer to abide by them -or not. Running everything in duplicate is good for safety but bad for performance, so most implementations can be expected to go with the cheap alternative and bypass the hardware security because word of the street is that everything can be dealt with in software, innit?

On a sidenote, I read the article as if these chips were designed to run both the car and the entertainment system, on the same chip ? I'm sure I'm wrong because that would be incredibly stupid but I can't find any element to the contrary, and Voland's right hand's comment seems to indicate that some manufacturers actually already went that route.

Icon for the obvious consequences.

The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: "useless coin pocket" ?

Something less stabby and alarming to coworkers

That is the very reason why I switched from centerpunch to nailpunch. I do own a couple of them of various makes due to the security drones at airports sometimes insisting that they are weapons (since, you know, they are made of steel - don't ask) and thus discarding them.

I usually go with whatever I can find at the local hardware store in the 10-cm range or so. Right now I carry a MacAllister but I'm pretty sure that's a French store brand. They look very much like Silverlines. When I was in Northern America I liked Fuller ones. Very durable if a bit expensive compared to store brands, and the square-ish head is actually quite pleasant.

ElReg!comments!Pierre
WTF?

"useless coin pocket" ?

Surely you jest.

Quick check: my "useless coin pocket" currently holds

- about 7 € in small change, because coffee machines

- a 20 € note because that can come in handy

- a naildriver, because it does everything you could possibly want to do (pop open a beer bottle, rip a parcel open, break the ice in the freezer, dig a hole to plant seeds, emergency sharpening of a blunt blade, open letters, file your nails on the rigged sides for the ladies, you name it -really *).

That is perhaps my most useful pocket!

*and I'm not even Strine! Imagine what THEY could do.

Bonne année, Google, Facebook! France to tax tech giants from 1 Jan

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Meh

how long does this last when when everything french vanishes from Google?

Not gonna happen. If Google did that, they'd leave a big chunk of the European (and African) market to the competition, allowing rivals to get a strong foothold from which to expand. Slightly diminished profit is still profit, and letting the competition unhindered is very un-Google.

the EU is built on the idea of a common market how do they fudge the rules and charge tax on a company registered in another EU country, or is this a sign of the EU itself breaking up?

That's actually 2 questions, "fudge the rules" and "the UE breaking up". The answer to the first question is rather obvious: there is currently no rule, so putting a local one in place while the issue is debated at a higher level is fair game. As for the second, the situation is self-explanatory (Italy, Greece, Brexit, Gilets Jaunes, the looming breakup of the German governing majority, and other signs), all that point to actual people being a bit fed up of the supranational, unaccountable nature of the EU Commission (the EU "Parliament" role was to muddy the waters by suggesting a democratic process, but people are beginning to understand what "consultative" means: the "Parliament is able to voice concerns, which the Commission is then free to disregard entirely)

Pork pulled: Plug jerked out of beacon of bacon delight

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

Re: Mixed feelings

I'm conditioned over many decades to indent my text with a <TAB> character

That would be four [space] for normal people, then?

[TAB] has been the [next field] key for the -also many- decades of HTML existence, it's strange that you would only notice it now.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Technology

It's been done for chips (fries, frites)

and bread or indeed pizzas. The linked article is for a single brand but these exist in various parts of the world. As spotted by yours truly : US, Canada, UK, France, Croatia. I couldn't comment on the output's quality though. I tend to like my pizzas with genuine pizzaiolo fingerprints (except perhaps for that one time in Tyne and Wear but let's not delve in that)

Brazil bested by hackers, Virgin plugs hub bugs, and France surrenders… records

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Not only by surprise, but totally alarmed!

I reckon "sacré bleu" is a British impression of the French "sacrebleu", which itself is a workaround to "Sacre Dieu" ("Holly God", almost litterally) which was once considered blasphemous because "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain". Same goes for "palsembleu" ("Par le sang de Dieu", meaning "for God's blood") and some others. These swears and their derivatives have seen little use -if any- for the past 3 centuries. To my knowledge, the only distant remnant is the occasionnal reference to "blue blood" lines: Sang Bleu, Sang de Dieu, as in direct line from the self-proclaimed God-approved Royalty of old.

Just so that you know...

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: The usual comment about the headline

Let's not forget Operation Dynamo, where after having had its ass handed to it by the Germans the BEF unilaterally decided to retreat to Blighty, anihilating Weygand's counter-offensive plan. Operation Dynamo was a "success" only thanks to the sacrifice of the French 1st Army, prompting the Germans to cheekily comment that Britain would fight to the death... of the last French soldier. This episode, merrily glossed over by most of the Anglo-Saxon world, played a big role in the following events, including French reddition. So erm, yeah "surrender monkeys" alright...

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Risk of fraud from the French hack...

... should be exactly zero, even if the database had included social security numbers, for at least two reasons : Loans and credit are actually regulated in France, as opposed to some other countries, AND they are not subject to a whacky "credit rating" extortion gang.

Hot on heels of 2.0, Vivaldi 2.2 adds tab session management among other goodies

ElReg!comments!Pierre

I'm using qutebrowser myself, you may want to give it a try -although be warned that it might be a tad too bare for the average GUI user.

As for the feature frenzy, while some may be nice I can't help but wonder about the inclusion of a mail client when pretty much everyone else who tried it came to the conclusion that it was not a good idea -quite some years ago, too.

Waymo presents ChauffeurNet, a neural net designed to copy human driving

ElReg!comments!Pierre

I'll just paste here (part of) a comment I posted a few days ago on a similar topic :

The only way to make safe driverless vehicles would be to put them on special lanes, perhaps specifically designed to avoid sharp angles; possibly with a system to keep them on trajectory at all times, like, some manner of metal railing? We could even mitigate the risk of collisions by having a bunch of them physically attached to each other. Oh, and then we could cut costs by devoting the propulsion function to a specialized unit. I think I'm on to something there, I'd better patent the idea before the Internet steals it!

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Pint

Re: Security through hilarity

We routinely send breakfast invitations from colleagues' sessions. The shtick is that if you get caught out, you do have to pay for everyone's breakfast. It's light-hearted and helps raising security awareneness, without damaging team spirit (as higher management never gets involved)

In case you're not already sick of Spectre... Boffins demo Speculator tool for sniffing out data-leaking CPU holes

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Mushroom

don't use virtualization or hyperthreading

This.

As a lot of you may be, I'm growing a bit tired of the dirty hacks pulled by chip vendors to make their stuff appear faster than it really is. Moore's law has lived, let it rest. Until we get really novel and interesting technologies working, the real improvement margin lies in getting back to elegant and optimized code, as opposed to the mad dash for ever-more lazy hacks-on-hacks layers that we are seeing today. As a rugby coach may say, "back to basics, team". Clean up your code, focus on efficiency, stop relying on hardware improvements to compensate for your sloppy code.

Of course I know I'm pissing reverse-windwards. Not a chance in hell that this will happen anytime soon, with the ever-increasing tendency to deliberately push buggy code -or hardware- into production as fast as possible. When "fail fast, recover faster" is an acceptable industry motto, you know you're screwed.

Waymo's revolutionary driverless robo-taxi service launches in America... with drivers

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: The whole driverless car thing

I can take 1000 mile car trips instead of dealing with the nightmare flying has become if I can sleep in the car, surf the web, watch TV etc. instead of sitting behind the wheel having to pay attention

And yet we play Elite for the fun of it :D

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: The sad truth about self-driving cars

while aiming at the free portion of the road

In an emergency obstacle-avoidance scenario that means throwing your weight toward the obstacle, by the way. I know, more counter-intuitive life-saving advice, but what can I do?

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

Re: The sad truth about self-driving cars

It will do exactly the same as a human would... slam on the brakes and hope.

I don't think it will, because it should bloody well not. Unless you're doing under 40 mph on a dry and clean road, slamming on the breaks at the last second is not going to achieve much. Either you have ABS (or similar) and you will only hit the target at a slightly reduced speed, or you don't and you will lose contact with the road and hit the target sideways instead of head-on.

As most motorcyclists who managed to stay alive know (and as most drivers should know), slamming on the breaks, while an understandable reflex, is almost never a good idea (well, that's why they invented ABS in the first place).

In the case of the Uber accident, the computer actually went through the correct analysis phases, trying to determine which direction the obstruction could move so as to swerve and avoid it. It only gave up after it drew a blank for "bike behaviour".

On a motorbike the desirable action is to drop a gear and rev it to the max while aiming at the free portion of the road (the idea being that you'll be past the obstruction before it has the chance to move in any direction). Of course some cars lack the acceleration needed for this maneuver to be successful.

Mine is the leather one with the elbow, shoulder and back protections, thank you.

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Terminator

Re: The whole driverless car thing

So they're lying to us about all those deaths and injuries on the road? And all those cars parked willy-nilly blocking everything must be an illusion?

Road safety is a complicated problem. These points that can be readily solved, and at a much lower cost, by ameliorating public transportation. But of course then you'd have to bear the other people using the same, which I know can be quite unnerving.

Please explain how autonomous cars would solve parking issues?

As for the neurosis part, I don't see where you are headed, but I don't suppose the idea of driverless thousand-kilogram masses of metal zipping around town is going to help with parents' neuroses. At least most human drivers are expected to show empathy, or fear of retaliation, or both. Running over another human being is quite horrifying for most of us, just look at the expression on the passenger's face in the Über accident. Most people would do almost anything in their power to avoid this, including putting themselves in immediate danger. Would an autonomous car put itself and its passenger in danger, should the choice arise? If so, they're probably not going to sell very well, as altruistic tendencies in people generally don't extend to accepting a sales pitch ending with "Oh, and the car will attempt suicide, possibly maiming you in the process, in order to protect innocent passerbys' lives".

I know that these cars have much better sensors than the typical human, but why not use these sensors' readings to raise the driver's attention instead of attempting to replace the human behind the wheel? A lot of cars already do that, to some extent.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: The sad truth about self-driving cars

@hammarbtyp

I'll have Steve over Herbert, 94, who is driving to town to have his glasses replaced, in the old trusty Chevy which is perfectly fine but for the brakes that would probably need a good seeing-to.

And when it comes to deciding to go hit a street lamp instead of lil' old me, should the choice be such presented, I trust both better than a computer.

And I think they are called railroads, actually.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

The sad truth about self-driving cars

Unless you completely remove non-self-driving vehicles and other minor inconveniences like wildlife, wheather or indeed pedestrians, there will always be moral cases where a choice needs to be made between porentially crashing the autonomous vehicle (with possible consequences for it's occupants) or merrilly zipping over an unexpected obstruction -or possibly both, as a recent Tesla "incident" showed. The question is, when this situation occurs, do we want some computer to make the call, especially as it may not have been programmed with the most ethical views in mind ("Hey Steve, can you ring PR and ask them how many kids we can run over before it becomes more expensive than losing a car?").

The only way to make safe driverless vehicles would be to put them on special lanes, perhaps specifically designed to avoid sharp angles; possibly with a system to keep them on trajectory at all times, like, some manner of metal railing? We could even mitigate the risk of collisions by having a bunch of them physically attached to each other. Oh, and then we could cut costs by devoting the propulsion function to a specialized unit. I think I'm on to something there, I'd better patent the idea before the Internet steals it!

The British Home Office was warned about its crappy data management – then Windrush happened

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: " the pool caught all cases, even those where the application was incomplete or incorrect,"

To a data fetishist (like those who set policy in parts of the HO) all data is good data, because more data is always better than less data.

Except when the data supports inclusion in the benefits system, in which case it can be safely ignored or indeed destroyed. These budgets are not going to cut themselves, after all.

SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Or by the deadline

Don't be silly, that's when the coding usually begins

Awkward... Revealed Facebook emails show plans for data slurping, selling access to addicts' info, crafty PR spinning

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: I give you...

Yes, the sentence "to stop a person from sharing their friends' data with developers." in the PR response alone is a winner.

Adobe Flash zero-day exploit... leveraging ActiveX… embedded in Office Doc... BINGO!

ElReg!comments!Pierre

or just dump the damn thing already.

Which one?

Naked women cleaning biz smashes patriarchy by introducing naked bloke gardening service

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Reminds me of the old joke (NSFW and sexist to boot)

In what warped universe is this considered either NSFW or sexist? (And why would the teller's gender matter?)

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: Why is it sexist

Spitting fat stings

Aye to that.

Tumblr resorts to AI in attempt to scrub itself clean from filth

ElReg!comments!Pierre

If past attempts are anything to go by,

When you appeal a post we’ve marked as adult, it gets sent to a real, live human who will look it over with their real, live human eye(s)

really means "When you appeal a post we’ve marked as adult, it gets sent to a real, live human who will look it over with their real, live human eye(s), and select a dismissal from our canned statements collection. Oh, and probably perma-ban you for the trouble, too".

GOPwned: Republicans fall victim to email hack

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Hillarious. I now feel the urge to trawl social media for badly-constructed posts, and register the appropriate domains!

WekaIO almost, but not quite, summits Summit supercomputer on storage performance

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: IBM Summit - 2.4x more storage nodes, 3.2x more NVMe Drives, 12.5x more memory, 5% faster

the point that many here are trying to make

Plus, of course, the lack of information on the systems used makes it difficult if not impossible to estimate the real-world TCO.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: IBM Summit - 2.4x more storage nodes, 3.2x more NVMe Drives, 12.5x more memory, 5% faster

The benchmark is all about performance per client, which is a different metric.

Exactly. Your system did perform very well on that benchtest, no question about that (congrats, btw). The standard issue about benchmarks still applies: they are only indicative of real-world performances if your real-world needs are reasonnably close to the test conditions, which is, I guess, the point that many here are trying to make.

you can see that WekaIO did over 2x the bandwidth of Spectrum scale (27GIB/sec vs. 9.8GIB/Sec)

Analogies are always imperfect, but the bandwidth metric kinda reinforces this particular one: while the motobike is very fast, it's not necessarily able to process large loads faster than a lorry (although in that case a better analogy would probably be "one Hayabusa vs a fleet of delivery scooters" but that doesn't remotely sound as good).

Horses for courses...

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: IBM Summit - 2.4x more storage nodes, 3.2x more NVMe Drives, 12.5x more memory, 5% faster

Exactly what I meant by my previous comment: the overall score is meaningless, what is interesting is the 10 vs 24 GIB/s and the 507 vs 170 kiOP/s. So, not at all designed for the same kind of load. About as comparable as a motorbike and an articulated lorry, as you put it.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: NVMe vs. SSD?

The final score is not the most informative thing here : I find the bw and md data much more interesting...

AWS has a security hub, OpenSSL has a new license, London has a problem with cryptocoins, and more

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: the company caught wind of an attempted hack on its customer rewards program

Perhaps a trial run. One would suppose that DK's reward program is under less scrutiny than, say, banking sites. Run your whole database against DK, identify re-used credentials, then re-use only them against banking sites?

Here are another 45,000 reasons to patch Windows systems against old NSA exploits

ElReg!comments!Pierre
FAIL

Re: Is anyone using UPnP anyway? @Big_D

So to summarize some of your points:

- UPnP is good on the LAN but an abomination when openened to the WAN, yet you cite Skype and online games using it as a plus ( as you may know, Skype and online games use UPnP solely to open ports to the outside). Https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/3666819

- You state that "UPnP can be turned on on any physical network port (as opposed to TCP port), LAN, WAN, Wi-Fi etc" (https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/3666819)

- You think that UPnP is required for LAN gaming because "without it, you would only be able to have 1 device on the network and you would have to manually do the port forwarding" (https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/3666819).

- You have "around 45,000 tracking domains set to 0.0.0.0 (unroutable) in [your] hosts file" ( https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/3664779 )

Am I correct? If so, does that sound even remotely sensible to you ?

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Flame

Re: Is anyone using UPnP anyway?

configuration of a router requires significant technical knowledge that most people do not possess nor will they possess. To do it properly needs a lot of wider IT related knowledge too.

Basic configuration of a HOME router? Surely you jest. It's significantly less complicated than, say, filing your tax report online, or indeed getting your new Windows laptop to work properly. The basic instructions and warnings would largely fit on 2 paper pages. We're talking about people who want Skype or their Playstation to work. These days it's litterally 4 fields on a configuration webpage (originating IP, port ; destination IP, port. That's it.). Some people argue that it's dangerous because lusers might open things they don't want open; that's ridiculous, since UPnP does exactly that but without any oversight -and without the end-user actually realizing that any such thing had happened at all.

Whith manual settings, you can individually disable each rule as soon as you think you don't need it anymore -just untick the box. Some home routers will even allow you to define specific periods of times in advance. How is that worse than letting any and all device set their own "holes" without you even knowing? (Yes, that is what UPnP does, by design).

It’s for manufacturers to be more responsible AND accountable.

Exactly. As much as car manufacturers should be held responsible for any and all car crash, or toy manufacturers should be held responsible for kids jumping out the window because they did not realize that the Superman costume did not grant flight ability. With your patronizing attitude, you -and many more- are that kid's parents.

See this, Google? Microsoft happy to take a half-billion in sweet, sweet US military money to 'increase lethality'

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: How Many Times, El Reg?

I'm not a big fan of the Orange Smurf, but it is indeed true that his predecessors were less than perfect themselves... and one of them still got a Nobel Prize for Peace (which I find utterly shameful given the continuation / intensification of wars and torture under his mandate. OK, the current one is arguably worse, but he is is not a Nobel for Peace nominee)

Marriott's Starwood hotels mega-hack: Half a BILLION guests' deets exposed over 4 years

ElReg!comments!Pierre

I know France had police-requested guest registration

Always had, still have, although there ARE ways to slip through if you really want to. Most countries have similar requirements, especially for foreigners. I can't remember registering in in a hotel in the Americas, Europe, Asia or Africa without providing a piece of ID (or a couple of locally-tradable pieces of paper-money, which I tend not to do, out of principle)