Posts by Pascal Monett

Pony up: Botnet succesfully targets Bitcoin

So, where are the hookers and the barmen ?

1bn down, 6bn to go: Zuck to grow Facebook by touting 'free internet onramp' for the poor

"Our vision isn’t to connect a seventh of the world's it's to connect everyone"

Here, let me correct that for you :

Our vision isn’t to track a seventh of the world, it's to track everyone and sell their personal details better than Google.

TFTFY

Sony enlists Michael Jackson's GHOST to flog Xperia Z2

"automatically shoots handsfree pictures through the day"

And does what with them ? Post them on your FB wall ? On Twitter ?

Yeah, I can see that being no trouble at all.

Pics: 'Bitcoin ATMs' spring up in the US

Re: fluctuation isn't an issue

If I put money in my bank on Monday, then come back on Tuesday to take the same amount out and get told it is now only worth 1/10th of what I had, then fluctuation is a damn big issue.

Microsoft asks pals to help KILL UK gov's Open Document Format dream

Re: you're taking away choice

No you're not.

People can very well continue to use MS Office products and save in .odf format.

The thing is, if that happens then they can also use something else to save in .odf format and that is very much what Microsoft does not want to see happen.

I sure hope you're right.

Re: "why do you think posting this patently untrue and discredited nonsense ..."

Because paid shill still has to shill.

Your trolling is starting to show, might want to cash that Redmond check in now.

You’re a LIAR and a CHEAT... la-la-la, I can't hear your lawyers

I think there's a stack of People magazines in the corner that disagree with you.

Antarctic glacier 'melted just as fast Long before human carbon emissions'

Re: What's the chance

Well I think the proper response to that is : we don't have a fucking clue either way.

We're still learning this, people. We don't know everything, and the "models" we use to try and find out are flawed and incomplete.

One day, I am confident we will have the proper data and know how to model it to divine future trends properly. At that time, if the science (not data fudging) says global warming and we are responsible, then that's the deal. Right now ? We don't know.

Once upon a time, people thought the Earth was at the center of the Univers. Today, the same kind of people are steadfast in their belief that Humanity is at the center of everything that happens on Earth, and Earth's destiny is tied to our existence.

Bollocks either way.

Toshiba Encore: The Windows 8.1 tablet that might catch on

Re: For some of us

Yeah, for SOME of you.

The rest of us have to work with Word and Excel.

Oh, and the video is unavailable.

Microsoft tries to re-invent GPS with cloudy offloads

Hang on, this is too good

So, Miss CLEO is now going to assist us in divining our position ?

Who on God's Green Earth (tm) is making up these acronyms ?

Retiring greybeards force firms to retrain Java, .NET bods as mainframe sysadmins

@Anonymous IV

Sorry, but I fail to see where it is said that the process should only take a few days.

Capture and record means meetings with the people working the processes, lengthy Q&A sessions to ensure that everything said is taken down, extensive review of the notes to produce a proper process detail report, and review and quality checks to ensure that the report mirrors reality.

Anybody with a brain can see that the whole thing is going to take time.

What I find very interesting is to find out that the accountants and MBAs/Senior Whatchamacallits didn't notice that they needed to ensure proper training for their personnel. COBOL has had the reputation of the dodo for decades already, it's not new. So how could these extremely (self-)important people NOT see this coming ?

These are bankers. The first rule of making money is that you sometimes have to spend some to make some, and sometimes you have to spend some to keep making more. It would seem that banks (like many big-name companies that have gone astray in the past 2 decades - looking at you HP) have also been taken over by pure accountants, the kind who break out in hives as soon as they see an invoice or an expense report, and start shivering if the next quarterly report is not better than the last.

It is time those kind of accountants go back to where they belong : dungeons. Let them sit on piles of gold and see if it gets more comfortable with time.

Boffins: You'll see, TWITTERNET! We'll get the TRUTH out of you...

It will all end in tears

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

I can accept that the idea behind this project is a good intention, unfortunately I cannot see it end well.

Either it never does work and, like Artificial Intelligence, will always be a few decades away, or somehow, someone does bend space/time / deal with the Devil and produces a working solution that is proven to always be right.

At that point we are one step away from never being able to utter another word on the Internet under pain of perjury. Nor will we ever skirt our fiscal duties as all our administrative declarations will be permanently wired to the worldwide Lie Detector. To summarize : we will have made the worst possible social tool one can think of.

Given that this whole idea will most likely work about as well as web translators (and probably only in English), I think the Truth Hydra (tm) will remain dormant for the time being.

Alca-Lu joins race to make telco networks more cloudy

"They can just turn up a new instance of a cloud application"

Whoosh!, there goes the credibility of the whole scheme.

Another instance of an application is not going to help when the bandwidth is not coming through.

And I'm not talking about hardwired kit. This whole cloudy thing is very, very decentralized now and people want to access it with mobile kit. Mobile kit currently depends on 3G for data connections, and 3G is shitty as hell quite often.

Don't get me wrong, when it works, it works fine. But when you're in a 3G hole, you get nothing. Another "instance" of your application is not going to help there.

Korean credit card companies hit with 90-day, $100m sales ban

I bow before the judicial system of such a country.

Doing that around here would generate an avalanche of protests citing "exceeding authority" or "unconstitutional" and a flood of media spin in favour of the bank subject to punishment.

Remember, our banks are "too big to fail", therefor untouchable even when they patently do wrong.

And yes, I do happen to think that it is the CEO that should go to jail for grave mistakes made by personnel HE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR. But I understand that "responsibility" is nothing more than an entry in the dictionary these days.

Mac Pro fanbois can rack 'em and stack 'em like real sysadmins

Totally agreed. I would have thought that rackmounting Macs would give an aneurysm to most of its user base anyways.

I mean, they already almost all keeled over dead when Apple finally abandoned PowerPC to embrace the Dark Side of x86, and now they're supposed to be used as glorified RAID managers ?

The shame, the shame.

Facebook gobbles WhatsApp for SIXTEEN BILLION DOLLARS

16 billion ? And no ads ? Does he think we're ALL smoking the carpet ?

Come on, please. First of all, $16 billion dollars ??

Clearly The Zuck is having money shower withdrawal issues. I'm looking forward to the inevitable writedown on that, and the media disaster that will ensue.

Second, either this Koum is the most naïve and innocent guy on Earth (I doubt that), or he has a compulsive need to show us he thinks we're stupid. All that money and you want us to think that a) WhatsItsName will remain unchanged and 2) there will be no ads ?

Here's a hint, Koum : FB is an ad broker. It uses its customer base to sell profiles to companies and target ads to its users. Take your time, Koum, it'll end up sinking in.

Unless, of course, Koum is actually just as much a cynical hypocrite as Zuck, in which case this is a marriage made in Heaven for those two.

American Idol host's keyboard firm smacks back against BlackBerry in patent spat

And your family member still calls that guy a friend ?

Somebody needs to refresh his memory concerning what a JOB is. Preferably with a cluebat. Made of wood, obviously.

"the inventors had allegedly withheld known prior art references"

And, once again, we need the Courts to do the job of the Patent Office, which has transitioned from granting patents to just rubber-stamping them.

From 0 to ERUPTION in 60 days: You thought that volcano was COLD?

Re: set up his lair in an extinct volcano

Yes, but then the mad scientist engages the positronic echopositioning confabulator and inadvertently drills a hole to the Earth's core, thereby re-activating the volcano and ruining the draperies.

Official: British music punter still loves plastic

"The UK recorded music industry grew 1.9 per cent last year"

What ?!

What happened to all that PIRACY ? I thought BPI/MPAA/RIAA/et al was being ROBBED BLIND by all those cheapskates who STEAL THE MUSIC.

And yet the CD market grew.

Man. Maybe the world isn't coming to an end after all, eh ?

Silk Road admins: Sorry for the hack, we're sorting out refunds

The FBI does not "have the cash". What the FBI has is a USB with many sets of 0s and 1s that, for some unknown reason, some people appear to attach a value to.

Re: Isn't Bitcoin itself ...

Indeed it is, so much so that there are many people who are absolutely convinced that it is not.

To those people I have two observations to make :

A Bitcoin could initially be fully minted in just minutes. Now it is a lottery where a number of BitCoins are "created" and their attribution depends on who finishes the last block first. In order to finish first, there are now companies that build specialized machines for burning through a block in minimal time, and of course, there are shady merchants who fleece the unwary in various ways with gay abandon.

On top of that, the "value" of a BitCoin varies from day to day by over a percent point sometimes by as much as 10%. It is not stable, not reliable and can be completely buggered by malice or a simple mistake.

So you can go "mint" your BitCoins. I wish you lots of fun and success.

Meanwhile, I will keep my day job which pays the bills and a bit more.

Fine, you can mock us: NSA spies back down in T-shirt ridicule brouhaha

Re: *Yes, I know they don't have one.

That's exactly what they want you to think.

Object to #YearOfCode? You're a misogynist and a snob, says the BBC

Re: I think over-specialization from an early age is very damaging

I agree globally with that sentence, but encouraging a natural affinity does not necessarily have to end in specialisation.

It can very well take the simple form of a voluntary hour spent learning to code via interesting activities, such as in a club house of sorts. Meanwhile, during the day, the child remains in the general courses of maths, language, history and geography and science. Just throw in an available hour on coding with someone who can answer questions, and let the interest bloom.

Re: Twitter, Facebook, Minecraft, youtube, Snapchat, and hundreds of TV channels

One of those is not like the others.

One of those is not passive. One of those promotes thinking and does not destroy neurons.

That one is Minecraft. Minecraft requires patience, planning, observation and perseverance, not to mention some amount of battle tactics. It can even scare you now and then.

Minecraft is a plus in a sea of negatives.

Million-dollar new disk tech could be USELESS for array vendors

Re: So Hitachi can't market its 6TB drives because no one else has them?

Nothing is wrong with innovation.

Everything is wrong with tying your company to a single supplier.

Single supplier means supply is directly tied to that supplier's ability to deliver. One hiccup on the road, and you have no product.

It also means that contract terms can change at the whim of said supplier. Once the supplier has 100% of its market share in you, in can change pricing basically when it wants. "Due to cost increase on the global market, we are raising our gross price by $10 a unit." Then what do you do ? Shout and stamp your feet ? You have no other supplier. Beg for a delay ? Why would he give one ? Switch to another technology ? That will take some time, during which you have to swallow the change - with the corresponding PR impact and - most probably - the lawsuit the supplier will throw your way for abusive termination of contract.

Production lines have inertia like boats, they take time to retool, and industrial companies are the Titanic, ever on the lookout for whatever kind of iceberg can sink them.

A single supplier is very much an iceberg for any industrial company. So it is not so much having a unique advantage, it is more like having a unique weakness.

Not to, mention; punctuation?

10,000 km road trip proves Galileo satnav works, says ESA

Re: "proving that the people that design smartphones have made a FAIL"

It does not prove that smartphone designers have made a fail.

It does prove that a smartphone does not have the same power requirements as a dedicated GPS tracker.

Who knew ?

Rand Paul launches class-action lawsuit to end NSA phone spying

If I'm not mistaken, you may be able to have phone snooping software legally, but I think you'll find that if ever anyone finds out you've used it on them without their permission or knowledge, the water you'll find yourself in will not be lukewarm.

I have to say, that sounds pretty unconstitutional to me.

But the solution is probably not in a lawsuit.

I think the solution is in changing the law.

And nothing should be allowed to be kept secret in a Congressional Hearing. Congress is the manifestation of The People. Nobody has the right to blindfold The People.

Dr Hurricane unleashes FUSION POWER at Livermore nuke lab

Re: "it is being developed by the US Navy. That should tell you something."

Oh it does. It tells me that there is some prize Defence Budget pork that has been secured by a private company whose CEO and board and going to live comfortably for decades to come.

It also tells me that there will be cost overruns, delays and assorted problems with the tech for decades to come.

Finally, it tells me that there may well be a final product, but it will not perform as per specifications and it will be more expensive to maintain than was initially planned.

Re: These can neither be slowed down, nor shielded effectively by anything sane

Don't worry, if we can't find a sane solution, we'll find an insane one !

Re: Stars do it trivially

Not really. Stars do it with quadrillions upon quintillions upon sextillions of tons of mass, so much mass that when the fusion process starts, the turbulence is contained by the x-septillions of tons of mass bearing down on it.

When there is no longer a stable reaction is when stars bloat to red giant status, or explode in nova or super-nova.

Hardly trivial matters. Then again, I acknowledge that it is difficult to wrap one's head around the fact that our Sun contains 99.5% of all matter in our Solar System.

And that there are billions upon billions of others just like it in the vast void of our Universe.

Rotten to the core: Apple’s 10 greatest FAILS

The Register bashes everything and everyone if there is a point - contrary to your post.

Where were you in these occasions ?

Yeah, nowhere to be seen. You probably didn't even read them, and you sure as hell didn't comment.

So if you go cherry-picking your way through El Reg and only read Apple-specific stuff, then you have no right to complain about the general content of this site which you apparently ignore. You have even less right to mention anything about constructive criticism.

You are, however, perfectly correct in mentioning pettiness, except that you have the wrong target.

Yeah, because we never see an article bashing Microsoft or Google around here.

disclaimer : for those of you without a clue, that is called sarcasm

Trials of 'Iron Man' military exoskeleton due in June

Re:"we can operate for weeks without taking in any energy at all"

I would say "go on and try to operate for a week without swallowing anything", but that would likely open me to a charge of attempted manslaughter.

Look it up or ask your doctor. You spend three days without even a drop of water and you are already on the verge of death. There are people who have gone on hunger strike for weeks (and I salute their resolve), but all of them drank water - sometimes sugared - in order to survive. And if you think that those people were in proper "operating" form after two weeks, well I think you need to go back to your doctor. Most of them were permanently confined to their beds after 15 days because too weak to get up.

We are not efficient energy users. We heat up as soon as we exercise, which means that we are wasting energy. If we were truly very energy-efficient, we would constantly be at room temperature. Take a look at humans in IR photos. You can clearly see the areas where skin is exposed - it's the whitest part of the picture.

We are not efficient in using energy, we are however quite efficient in recovering it from what we eat and in storing it.

FBI offers $10,000 bounty for arrest of laser-wielding idiots

Will never see the light of day.

All the cat owners will boycott that thing out of existence.

Minecraft developer kills Kickstarted Minecraft movie

And strawberries cost more in winter.

Your point is ?

Greenland glacier QUADRUPLES speed, swells seas

As far as the 85 most "successful" are concerned, it's 7 billion losers, and we're all part of that group.

Yes, you included.

Microsoft gets with the times, builds two-factor authentication into Office 365

Re: "but really, does anything you are storing need that level of security"

Sorry but that question is out of touch with reality.

The Cloud (tm) is being marketed as "the perfect solution" for data hosting, targeted towards companies. As such, client lists, contracts, payroll information and even production data can be considered sensitive information.

Last I looked, I didn't see companies posting either their full client list nor their payroll on the web.

Since The Cloud (tm) is supposed to offer hosting services for company data, then yes, it should also include encryption and secure access by default. Saying that companies should host their own data if they have sensitive information is not serious given the way The Cloud (tm) is being marketed.

California takes a shot at mobile 'killswitch' mandate

"let's see if it can be done reasonably with proper safeguards"

Done reasonably ? In that industry ? Imposed by law ?

Fat chance of that.

JavaScript is everywhere. So are we all OK with that?

"If I was just getting started in programming, and I didn't know what language to pick...."

I wouldn't pick JavaScript because I would not know it existed.

I'd more likely pick Visual Basic because I've heard of that in school.

Of course, if I were a somewhat enlightened individual I would use the web (who am I kidding? I'd Google it) and search for "programming language", intent on finding what is the best language for beginners.

And I'd probably end up choosing Visual Basic anyway, once I had been allowed to leave the hospital after my trauma treatment of having read all the bile that is thrown around on everyone else's programming language and had managed to decide to learn programming in spite of all the hate, condescendence and mockery that abounds when commenting programming languages.

But I doubt that a beginner programmer is going to go for JavaScript since JavaScript is nothing without a browser and HTML, CSS and probably PHP, and all that is a bit much for someone who doesn't even know Hello World yet.

NYPD dons Google tech specs: Part man. Part machine. All Glasshole

So, NYPD is crash-testing Glass in the field

I'll be interested in hearing just how long those things survive in the streets in such conditions.

Methinks not long.

Re: "The old trick of yelling...."

That's an old trick already ?

Life support's ABOUT to be switched off, but XP's suddenly COOL again

Re: Lets go with the ever popular software/car analogy

Lets not.

A car is a physical object that cannot easily be replaced.

An OS is a collection of ones and zeros that can be copied indefinitely and, therefor, replaced without effort. In addition, the ones and zeros do not rust, do not change color and do not become less efficient over time (not talking about the cruft).

Apples and oranges.

Re: writing new malware for an obsolete OS

An obsolete OS that still holds 29% of the market.

Win98/95 are part of the block labelled "Other", representing 0,10% of the market.

So Win98/95 are definitely not worth working on. WinXP, on the other hand, encloses almost one third of all computer users, who are more and more clueless home owners, ie ideal pickings for scammers and criminals.

This is very much an opportunity for the crims, since XP users may only be a third of the market, but probably represent a better return on investment since anything that works is something the crims can soon consider stable.

Re: "none of them have had any security problems"

You mean to say "none of them have been targeted yet", don't you ?

Crafty French hackers tweak 'My Account' page, slurp 800,000 Orange users' details

"never provide personal data over email"

You mean, over the email address that you guys just leaked ?

Why, thanks for the suggestion. Now all the affected Orange customers need to do is reinforce their spam filter to face the veritable deluge they will no doubt be getting.

Yup, now is the perfect time to remind users of security measures THEY should be taking.

Well done, Orange.