Posts by Pascal Monett 19448 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Let's be coherent here a moment. If you're talking about competitive gaming, you're talking about guys who lug their high-end gear to the places where the competition is taking place. These are not people who are going to accept some server farm somewhere be responsible for what they see on screen and have to react to. These guys (and gals, I think) want everything to be as fast as possible because they want to be as fast as possible. And spending milliseconds waiting for a server somewhere is not going to be acceptable in their mindset. It will be a possible point of failure, and they want to WIN.
So remove competitive gaming from the equation and what do you have left ? A promise to make Joe Nobody's anemic laptop perform like an Alienware.
I'll believe it when I see it, but I don't think hardware sellers have anything to worry about.
For a politician it certainly is. Lots of bluster and thunder at the pulpit, much moral high ground and easy brownie points to gather, and no worry about consequences because Porn Will Find A Way.
Besides, it beats worrying about what to say concerning Brexit or any other actual, serious issue that has no real solution.
Then, once out of the limelight, it's back to PornHub for a relaxing quickie.
Oh, and concerning equal pay, in a world where every other job type available sees women paid less, I'm happy to leave them the high ground on this one.
We've been doing that forever. Intel would trot out a new CPU that was blazingly fast, then Microsoft would trot out a new Windows that ate all that performance and then some.
Every time a new, much more powerful video card came out, you could be sure that there was a game that would bring it to its knees gasping.
Let's face it : we've only just arrived at a time when low-end models are good enough for everyday, home office stuff. That in itself is quite something, and handily explains why people are not buying so many laptops and PCs any more - they don't feel the need, what they've got works well enough.
Even though hardware is nowhere near as expensive as it used to be, a hardware upgrade is nowhere near bringing the same impression of increased power we used to have either. It used to be a thrill to put €850 in a new video card because wow, look at how much better my games run. These days I see new €1000 cards or CPUs and think : why bother ? For the 5% increase I'll get in performance, it's just not worth it.
"by 2030, NOBODY in developed world markets (and some more advanced "emerging markets") will be buying petrol or diesel cars"
That the UK government announces plans is hardly significant. They plan to have a working border system in time for Brexit, but there isn't a soul who thinks that's actually going to happen.
I concur that ICE vehicles are on the outgoing path, but 2030 is way to early to replace all the gas stations with electric chargers, not to mention have the electrical power production in place to ensure that the rolling guzzlers will all be recharged without fuss or incident.
I would think 2080 a more realistic tipover point.
And I still haven't read about how ecological all those batteries will be.
Downplayed ? The very title uses "nuked", "phoned" and "China". That feels pretty in-the-face to me and not downplayed at all.
It also clearly states that the app was the 4th highest grossing, which makes the whole thing rather on the important side. I agree that the number of downloads is indeed missing, but if your app is in the top ten money-makers, we're not talking thousands, that's for sure.
“Further, internet voting should not be used in the future until and unless very robust guarantees of security and verifiability are developed and in place, as no known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the internet.”
Finally an official voice of reason. I have been watching US elections with complete disbelief ever since the Diebold fiasco. It is high time a very big broom clears out all the cobwebs in that area, and this just might be the herald of its arrival. Maybe.
Now to see how interested parties will organize the resistance.
Seems it also cuts accuracy by 90%.
Also, don't you just love when government-level info is sent abroad without any control or authorization ?
With all the talk about encryption backdoors and NSA surveillance, you'd think they'd at least keep the data within their own borders.
If a certain kind of company is most likely to produce bad behavior, why does the administration not spend more attention to the people behind the application ?
A company does not just fold, there's a director with a name and an address. Should that name show up again, an alert should show up. I don't know how the system works, but reading this article I'm under the impression that there's a group of miscreants who regularly fold a company to make another one further away. It's almost certainly more complicated than that, but how is it that all those computers we have these days cannot weed out the chaff and signal when a given name is once again applying to set up the same kind of company ?
Surely there's a limit to the number of brothers, cousins and uncles that can be used as patsies ?
For those who don't know, it's right here.
And, if you're still interested after that, please view the greatest, all-time best Muppet sketch here.
Ah, the Muppets. Good times.
P.S. : This one is a pretty good runner-up to the title of all-time greatest.
I don't think so. I tried, and the browser said "Site Not Found".
</sarcasm>
I would also appreciate a website clearly listing cloud failures, date, time, reason and duration. Searching with Google is possible, but there's too much noise for anything precise.
Actually, El Reg is not a bad place to search. Just search for TITSUP and you'll get a lot of good hits.
I don't care how it's implemented if it's falling over all the time.
Explaining why is all nice and good, but it doesn't change the fact that The Cloud (TM) is as reliable as it is solid.
I'm glad you have your contingency plans. More companies need to wake up to that fact.
What's hard about all this is that a) it's hard, and b) we don't have all the answers yet.
So, like evolution, those who have the least patience and knowledge just want to clear the table and start over.
Scientists, on the other hand, know that what they do know is pretty solid, it's what they don't know that they want to find out. Clearing the accumulated scientific knowledge base is not going to help.
The point is : we must let them do their jobs. Time will reveal the answer.
Starting over is useless if we can just go and do the same thing all over again.
We need official guidelines to start over with, and legal (maybe penal) sanctions if those guidelines are not respected.
As for efficiency, stating that your statistical analysis machine prevents 85% of anything is meaningless without proof. Show me what it blocked, and what it let through, then I'll decide what the percentage actually is.
FaceBook needs to be held to account on this, and that means oversight. I know FB doesn't like it, it thinks it is a company and no company likes external review (hell, most don't even like internal review), but like it or not, you're dealing with Society and what you do (or don't do) has an impact that Society has the right to know about.
I agree with you that something doesn't fit. Mandiant had time to find the malware on the destroyed computer, find that there were archives for exfiltration, find everything it needed to determine the scope of the problem, but did not put the computer under quarantine, did not take it away, nor even put a "Do Not Touch" sign on it ?
What kind of forensic data management is that ?
And how is it that no manager at Premera told the IT peons to leave that thing alone ?
Never underestimate a human's ability to not complete an action properly.
That is a valid remark in all areas of life, but I think it is especially true in IT. Ironically, IT is the only domain where you generally only need a keyboard to do stuff, and even then, people can be too lazy to finish properly.
Um, 7 meters per second is running speed. That's not slow, unless you're expecting your drone to chase cyclists in which case, yeah, it's probably not good enough. But on foot ? You'll need to go into a store to lose it. Out in the open, once it has you in its sights you are not running away from it.
Not as long as the battery is good, that is.
What I'm wondering is how much noise the thing makes in flight. People are talking about surveillance, but if the drone is screeching like a banshee to stay aloft, its "surveillance" is going to be quite obvious. They'd need to have near-silent drones that can track people from a dozen or so meters up, to be as inconspicuous as possible. Still, I'm guessing the drone isn't very small, so it will be quite visible in the day time.
Yeah, but as soon as some people read "AI" they think we actually have it, and the money flows.
Doesn't matter that the statistical analysis machines are crap at anything touching human communication, they have a shiny label. Look, it glitters !
Where the stat machines are good is in correlating humongous amounts of data points and deriving directions in which more analysis could bring beneficial understanding of said data points and what they mean. But as soon as you ask them to deal with keyboard activity they're out.
Okay, in the UK it's a given, I know, but IIRC Australia has had its problems and now it's New Zealand that is wasting money.
Is there a special curse on IT in healthcare ? Or is it that healthcare manglement is particularly clueless about project specification and procedures ?
Oh, so you're not auto-filling Russian contact details anymore, is that it ?
Because that really represents a massive change. Not that someone can't enter it manually, right ?
And CfA is now a competitor to Google ? Really ? In what alternate universe is that possible ?
Google PR spokesdrone trying to paint Google as a victim. FAIL.
The fact that a spokesdrone says that at all is nice to hear.
Too bad it's just PR and nothing will change as far as Microsoft's mentality is concerned. It has been a long time since MS ever thought of _maintaining_ simplicity.
"ABC wants to remove public references from Google to a criminal conviction that are apparently stopping him from setting up an investment business"
I'm sorry, but a country with a registry of companies should have its own access to police records, and should definitely be capable of deciding whether or not to grant a license to someone without using Google.
In Luxembourg I can tell you that if you have a criminal record, you will not be setting up a company, nor will you have manager status in any company - and Google has nothing to do with it.
If this ABC thinks Google is keeping him from becoming CEO, well that says a lot about his level of intelligence.
Yeah, 99% is "some".
The same old words, the same lame excuses, the same bungling ineptitude. I feel like yawning, it's not even funny any more.
On the other hand, maybe TSB is going to be the first bank where customers actually vote with their feet.
Nah, not gonna happen.
So, what's the news about bears in the forests these days ? . . .
The USA is not supposed to compare itself to lesser countries to feel good about itself.
Since WWI US policy has always been to set the best laws and follow them, compare its success to itself and declare whether or not it was doing well. If it wasn't, it was time to try harder.
Until the NSA took over, Eisenhower left the political scene (with a warning) and fraidey-cat politics became de rigueur. So now you have to compare yourselves to Russia and China to feel better.
What a pity.
No, I can't see how large it is. There isn't a single thing I can use as scale on that first picture. The second one has apparently some fleshy bit on it I interpret as a hand, but I'm not sure. As far as I know, that iThingy could well be sitting on a regular 1 meter diameter kitchen table, which would make it frikkin' huge.
The next time you want us to "see", chuck a ruler next to it.
Well of course it did, but that doesn't mean you were at the starting point. Not until you start using Apple GPS, obviously.
I can check out the road from New York to Philadelphia, but I live in France, so any consideration that I am at either of those locations is wrong. Of course, I'm guessing that >90% of such consultations is done by people who actually are at the starting point, so the assumption must be generally right, but still : until you've turned on your GPS, the app is not supposed to know where you are.
@Richard 12 : your SatNav is a complete package, with self-contained maps (that you should be able to update). A smartphone may have maps for "offline" use with certain apps, but generally they use the server for the data and for navigation.
In other words, the DDoS prevented DraftKing users from . . gambling.
Come on, if your site gets DDoSed and all you do is publish rankings, then your users are going to wait it out patiently until your site is online again and you're not losing money from users that are temporarily not "actively engaging".
If you're loosing wads of money for a "sports" site because you're offline for half an hour, then your site is a gambling site.
Hey, don't knock it - they're progressing.
While we have 500+ miles as standard, USAians used to have very cheap oil. Twenty years ago, had there been an Internet, he would have been saying that he had a nice 200+ mile range.
Now that they're paying around the same price, their mileage is starting to go up. Good for everyone.
No, it would just be very costly. And replicating the resilience of the global web is very hard on a tiny replica, so public internet it is.
But I don't like the idea that some state-sponsored hackers (NSA no more than anyone else) are going to be able to play merry mayhem with ATC data.
And that is why our aircraft crisscross the world with so little accidents. If air traffic was controlled like Paris controls its périphérique, we'd be reading about a plane crash every hour.
Air traffic is the very last bastion of actual redundancy requirement, even NASA has trouble doing as well (not a good sign).
I remember that one time when a Swiss ATC was responsible for a plane crash. It shocked the world because everyone thought that Switzerland was the last place beancounters would have been able to interfere, but that's what it was.
Beancounters and safety do not go together.
Well given how much spam was going around before GDPR, I'd say they were already running wild with no way to identify and stop them.
So, no change.
I love it when facts come like a clue-by-4 in the face of people who spew bullshit to the benefit of only themselves.
If that were the case, IBM might have filed a patent on their PC and we wouldn't have the Internet today, or smartphones, or much of anything else in computer tech because IBM would have stifled the market by forcing everyone to work with it at its prices.
Companies would have a few PCs, like in accounting, design and HR, but that would likely be all.
Maybe Apple would evolved very differently, and the war between PC and Mac would have given Apple a far greater share of the market, but we're still talking closed design here.
It is the fact that IBM never put a patent on its toy that birthed the computing world we have today.
And gave many of us our careers.
So thanks, IBM, for not having had today's patent lawyers on hand back then !
