Posts by Pascal Monett 18239 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Lyon a shithole ?
I don't know what part of Lyon you spend your time in, but it is obviously not the right part. Or it's been a while since you went there.
I visited Lyon last year and I much prefer it to Paris. Great architecture, nice people, proper living standards, free bus transport, and generally much cleaner.
I felt at ease in Lyon, which is much more than I can say for Paris.
And I'm French.
Entertainment network with USB port to plug in any phone, linked to speakers and everything Internet-facing on its own network. Your in-car webcam has been hacked ? No problem, that's all that is accessible. Just don't shag in the car and you'll be fine (with a bit of black tape on the webcam camera, of course).
Car CAN bus totally seperate, with high-level fob key ciphering to open doors and start engine, and under-the-hood/bonnet USB port for maintenance. Unhackable unless you get physical access (like most non-computer things these days).
Why, why, WHY did they throw everything on the same bus ?
Well, in the end, it doesn't matter. A few hundred deaths and a raft of class-action lawsuits will certainly sort the issue out.
Unfortunately, it seems that that is what it is going to take.
I've been lucky with my two OCZ's as well. Bought in 2011, right before the company lost wind, I feared the worst, but they're still chugging away, reliable as ever.
Okay, I have all my computer equipment on a UPS with current smoothing (or whatever that tech is called). That may count for something.
Then again, I've seen colleagues with their SSD laptops die suddenly in the span of ten minutes, so maybe I'll look into buying some replacements soon, just in case.
Edit : just checked, can't find any OCZ to buy anymore - so that's one problem gone.
Well duh. It's hardly new : 20 years ago people were forwarding mails promising that Microsoft would give money to whomever sent it to 20 people (or however many).
I have spent quite a bit of time trying to respond and educate the people sending me the latest fraud mail of the day - because many of those were people I personally knew. Some of them do not speak to me anymore; apparently I dared challenge their worldview and they did not accept that. I do not miss them.
But it would seem that there are precious few people who do even the most basic checks when they get something that appears to be "insider news". They do not check that the originator is from the same domain they claim to represent, they do not check that any names or places mentioned actually exist, they do not check, period. They read, accept, forward and move on, feeling good about themselves when they have only just participated in making the world more stupid.
The silver lining on this dark cloud of dispair is that, sometimes, someone actually accepts to be educated and understand how simple it is to control the verisimilitude of a new post.
Okay Box, you're taking the high road and looking down on the riff-raff. Nice clean air where you are, I guess. Unfortunately, targetting Fortune 500 companies means you're limiting your market penetration to a few million max - and you don't have them all.
DropBox may only be getting $100 per paying customer, but DropBox's market is the entire Internet.
Let's make a quick calculation : 2% of a billion users is 20 million - and that's already a heck of a lot more users than there are licenses to get from Fortune 500 companies.
Fortune 500 companies also have a nasty habit of being very demanding for the money they pay - and each Fortune company has its own demands. That's going to be taxing on your Dev department as well.
As far as I see it, Box, you're going to be eating your words soon enough.
I am personally quite unhappy with what Lego has become.
I got a medieval castle when I was 13. All the walls and towers and even the secret door where made of basic Lego bricks, all reusable in thousands of ways.
Last XMas my godson got a Saturn V rocket. He spent two days putting it together, but all I could see was "and then what ?".
I do not see any reuseability in those specialized, much too complicated pieces. Okay, you get a nice-looking spaceship, but that's all you get.
It's a lie. All og Lego is now a lie. Once upon a time it was about imagination, now it's just about cashing in.
Sorry, Lego, looks like you're just nostalgia now. I won't be sorry to see you go if you don't change your ways.
"the FCC does not manage telecommunications on the island of PR"
Okay, lets admit that. If that is the case, then why the big show and tell about some nonexistent money ?
If Pai has nothing to do with the problem, he has no reason to fund its resolution.
I think you need to recheck your facts.
It's always difficult to know exactly what happened in such cases. Maybe there actually was some sort of discrimination, but one thing feels certain : she's not being objective about it.
So he didn't answer her emails. That in itself is not proof of discrimination. After reading this article, I have the distinct feeling that the bias is on her part, given that she barely recognizes attempts to be balanced and immediately follows by the base statement "but I know it isn't because of what I saw", but without bringing any facts to the table.
In short, she may have been right to feel slighted, but acting like a harpy about it does not make her case.
I think the judge was right on this.
Sure. Go say that to Azure or AWS guys who've repeatedly seen entire continents go TITSUP because of some lone router change or command feedback issue.
DevOps to me seems like a pit where you throw all the tools, throw in the developers, have the band start up some shrieking version of Hells Bells, and hope for the best in the frenetic activity that ensues.
What I want to see is how this new fad will stand up in ten or twenty years' time. And what new fad will have taken the board by then.
Well finally something concrete for top-level executive. Mind you, he wasn't banned from ever being a chairman again, he was just banned from being chairman of a financial institution. In other words, he might be able to set up a charity that does banking.
So, not exactly the sharp edge of the axe, but still . .
Ooh the little bastards. That has to be a Windows weakness, I imagine that a Linux distro would not reboot, but ask confirmation from the user.
Then again, I'm pretty sure this scumware is dedicated to Windows, as usual. Keep going while the going's good, scum. One day, Windows will be just a souvenir, and you'll have to work a lot harder to take over a machine.
Here's the choice : waste more time trying to endlessly discuss a universal tax solution that will take a few decades to get to (and not get any tax money at all from anyone during that period), or decide on something now that will have an effect on the four largest tax evaders of the planet (and see billions come in immediately as a result).
The world is not perfect, and imperfect steps are the consequence.
What a ridiculous choice. A gaming monitor is not an HD video monitor. You can't sell a ridiculously large screen like that, market it for gaming but make it for TV viewing.
I have a true gaming monitor : an Acer XB281HK. I'm sitting pretty on 3840 x 2160. THAT is a gaming monitor, and it stands next to a Prolite with "only" 1920 x 1200 that I bought back in 2011.
In 2011 you already had screens with more than 1080 vertical.
What a shameful waste of screen surface.
As usual, terrorism is the go-to excuse for justifying all this surveillance.
Sorry, but to catch terrorists you do not need to blanket the country with cameras, just the airports and seaports. If terrorism is really that important to you, then add radars along the coast to catch any incoming boats that do not enter the normal channels, that way you can send a "greeting committee" to make sure they "arrive safely".
That should be enough to deal with terrorism.
Concerning tying the hands of the police behind their backs, well the alternative appears to be give them a blank check. Neither is good. And what do I care that private companies are using the tech ? Private companies cannot arrest me and throw me in jail by mistake. Stupid argument.
Finally, as far as cameras are concerned, don't make me laugh. I cannot count the times I've heard about people wanting to check the images to find the perp who stole their bike only to be told that there were no recordings at that time, or to find that the image was perfectly useless on the rare occasions they actually got an image to check.
Makes me wonder what all the hoopla is really about. Is all this just the PM's private perv channel ?
No, it does not. That hasn't kept politicians from trying to legislate the value of Pi, or, for a more modern aspect, trying to legislate backdoored encryption.
The problem with politics is that the representatives are elected by idiots and, sooner or later, you'll have a lobbyist full of money who will come in and convince said representative that this suitcase is more important than his constituents. Either that or, just as likely, the politician will start believing in his own importance and convince himself that his opinions are the expression of God's Will and must be brought into being.
There is no politician who will measure his actions against the Constitution and the law. That is so last millennium.
It seems to me your system is a tad too complicated.
As for me, I have a programmed my own spam filter and it follows these rules :
1) If I have already accepted mail from that address, then it passes through (whitelist)
2) if my email is not specifically in the SendTo, it is spam (kills all those generic mails sent to God knows who I couldn't care less about)
3) if the ReplyTo domain does not match the From domain, it is spam (go ahead and pretend to write from Microsoft while sending from GMail, I dare you)
There are a few more criteria.
I don't need the IP address, and I don't need the WhoIs, although I do understand your use of it.
My system uses less bandwidth though.
Oh, and I'm just a private person. My needs are not those of a company, I acknowledge that.
Hope springs eternal. Unfortunately, the current state of the US government and political parties clearly demonstrates that the democratic process has been hijacked by interested parties and taken over by people who have taken essential positions for the wrong reasons.
Until the American People stand up and demand change to a situation that respects The People, nothing will change. The worst of it is people like Pai who are blatantly in violation of the trust of their position and yet, no police officer is marching up to him with a pair of handcuffs to take him in for treason.
Because as far as I'm concerned, he is a traitor to everything his position is supposed to mean.
Yeah, it does. Except opinions are like assholes, everyone has one. That does not mean that everyone's asshole opinion is worthy of being heard.
I blame the first idiot journalist who asked the nearest Joe Nobody what he thought about some event. Ever since then, journalism has been all about getting the opinion of "the people". As if those idiots had a valid opinion. Oh, there has been another school shooting ? Do you really think anyone is going to say that it is not a tragedy ?
Stop trolling the streets pretending to get the "people's" opinion. I don't give a damn about "the people". I want EXPERT opinion. I want to hear from people who have spent decades studying the subject.
I don't have time to listen to the barely-thought-through brain farts of Jersey Shore fans.
It seems that failing is good now, fashionable even. Certainly relieves the headache of actually planning something, doesn't it ? Go for 80%, bang it out, see what breaks. That's the second article in a few days that I read that mentions those exact words, so apparently the suits deem that it is a proper approach to developing a product.
Somebody phone Her Majesty's Government, we now know what they've been doing wrong with their IT projects all these years : they've been failing slow and hard. Need to pick up the pace.
Not fair. You cannot blame a medical treatment for being contrary to a person's views.
I'm generally against GMOs as well (on the basis that I'm not convinced we really know the long-term consequences of what we're doing), but I am dead against dying. I will thus eat GMO food as happily as any other food (not that we have much of a choice these days anyway).
One of the primary uses of a census is as a reality check : this is the actual state of the country.
You cannot have that reality check if you are just scraping databases for info. In that case, you're just compiling existing data and you'll miss the possibility of including pointed questions to uncover some specific behavioural or societal change.
Do it online, by all means, supplement the census with administrative data if you wish, but do not reduce the census to just perusing databases.
Well go ahead and legislate. That'll be just about as useful as existing laws that criminalize gun use for robbing banks. Sure, it's forbidden, but if thieves want to rob a bank, that law is not what is going to stop them from having guns when they go in.
For encryption it is the same thing. Legislate all you want, if a group of terrorists is intent on striking in your country, a law is not going to stop them from using "illegal" encryption and then what are you going to do ?
Yeah, bang up some shitty code and let the customers debug it.
Congratulations, Bosch, you've just made my "Never Buy Version 1.0" list.
And you're not far from my "Never Buy At All" list either.
As for your stance on security, I think I'll be hearing a lot more about Bosch in the future in these columns.
And they'll never be the 0.2 seconds you wanted.
Seems like mobile phone makers are coming close to the point where nobody will care any more what model they put out. Just make 'em reliable and cheap and we'll be happy enough.
Oh, and stop trying to make them into PCs. We have tablets for that.
Well, if it has more impact on bright objects such as a supernova, it very well might since a certain type of supernova are used as standard candles and we specifically take those to measure distances.
On the other hand, we've been using them for a while already, so even though there might be an error in the actual distance, the same error is present at each measure so the difference remains reliable (I think ?).
In other words, maybe, maybe not.
How is Siri going to make the difference between a child being assaulted by a pedophile and one who stubbed his/her toe and is expressing justifiable but innocent pain ?
Siri won't.
So then the argument will become "put a 911 operator on the line to listen and decide", and then we have two issues : violation of a person's property by forcing it to dial 911 without consent (plus all the people in the vicinity - great use of resources there, no possibility of confusion at all) and shoving the responsibility to a harassed phone operator. Sounds like kicking into the sidelines to me.
This whole article is a brilliant demonstration of the stupidity of the "think of the children" mentality. Oh, so phones can do this now ? Well enroll them into the police force and have them tell on everything all the time, because that is the only thing that can protect the children.
No thought of any consequences, or even of the practical issues that can be encountered.
In short, useless and dangerous.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
