Posts by Pascal Monett 18239 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Sounds like DDOS time !
Effing bastards. From now on, I am nuking anything with "telemetry" in its description.
Now, more than ever, it is a good idea NOT to auto-install WU patches and wait for feedback before choosing anything.
Really Nadella, if you want us on the warpath, keep it up.
Citation please ?
I do agree that this affirmation appears to be, at first glance, a reasonable one, but is it actually true ?
The wikipedia article makes no mention of meritocratic influence on this Liquid Democracy thing.
Your point of view as a developer is valid and I totally support being paid for one's work.
The point of jailbreaking is not, however, just cheating on app payments. It can also very much be getting rid of preinstalled crap that your operator foists on you without asking for your opinion on the matter.
I do not jailbreak my phone as a matter of principle. I do get pissed off every time I see yet another update for Google Play or whatever other piece of crap thing they want to update, instead of letting me use my bandwidth as I see fit.
Of course, I am rather laughing at the moment because, after almost 3 years of use, the available space for downloads is now insufficient for the crap updates to load. The only problem is that I can't get the other updates I need either.
So it's a clusterfuck, basically, and it demonstrates that nobody in that food chain has given a moment of thought to the problem because everyone expects consumers to change their phone as soon as the new shiny comes out.
If I jailbreak my phone, then I can get rid of all the crapware I don't want and keep my phone storage space for the stuff I actually need.
But I still won't do that, because the risk of exposure to malware by simply being jailbroken is too great.
Seems I'm gonna have to give thought to replacing that phone after all.
Obviously Google does no want an open hearing - why allow your competitors to have a voice ? They just might have an argument that sticks.
Google is not about openness, and nothing about the inner workings of Google is open in any way. Google is all about backroom deals, lobbying and whispering softly in the right ears. With a brown envelope if need be.
Anything to avoid proper regulation and oversight. It's such a hassle to find ways around that.
Sorry ?
We have an article telling us that Zuckerberg is planning to allow Facebook to automatically order and pay for stuff in our name and without our consent* and you're up in arms about baby shoes ?
Wrong priority, man.
* yeah, I'm sure there'll be opt-out in some version of an upcoming change to the T&Cs but, from the article, it sure doesn't sound like Facebook is going to pop up a confirmation request every time
I wonder why.
Maybe it's because there's nothing they could say that would be taken seriously unless it were the words : "We goofed. Big time." ?
One thing I wonder, why didn't they push back the launch date when it was becoming obvious that they were not on track to succeed ?
Is it that urgent that Microsoft push out a new OS now ? They could have easily pushed the date back eight weeks to coincide with delivery and I don't think anyone would have actually noticed.
Apparently, to get accountants to approve this plan, all you'll need to do is show them the trend in ad-blocking software.
Yes, it will cost money. There is no such thing as a free lunch. But I do believe that something along the lines of what I said is the only viable solution to the problem the article outlined.
Anything else is just going to cost more money for nothing. We have no way of tracking which ad shows up where, and if Google knows it ain't talking (as usual on this kind of matter).
The industry urgently needs to inject some oversight on the whole ad publication process, and the logical place to put that oversight is where ads are accepted for publication. By removing the ad-creation tools from the hands of the ad makers, you straightjacket them into a scenario in which they simply cannot abuse the system any more.
You nuke the problem from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
From this article I gather that the ad system is basically anyone foisting a program on ad companies who then push it out via Google (mostly).
This is the easy way to do it, and puts all the tools in the hands of the entity making the ad, giving scum the possibility to wreak havoc like they are.
So take the tools away from the ad makers and put them in the hands of the ad companies. Create a PHP-like ad-creation language. Ad makers will have to submit the code and content for their ads, and the ad company will be in charge of vetting and "compiling" the two into an actual ad before pushing it out. Simulators can be made to allow the ad maker to be sure that it will display as intended.
In doing so, we do away with every single security nightmare we currently have without having to change a major part of the current infrastructure.
I'm sure it's not difficult to do.
In the Real World, you don't go putting confidential company data in the hands of complete strangers, penalty clause or no. Fat lot of good a lawsuit will do you when your IP starts showing up in competitor's products, or your customer base starts shrinking so fast your head spins.
When you have your data in-house, you have the possibility of witnessing the progress, assessing the situation, calling in expertise if necessary, switching to another server you hastily set up (or have carefully planned). You know what is going on.
You can't call for expertise when your data is managed by another company - that is their call.
Whereas having your data in the Cloud will be a nightmare of idle workers and frantic manglement when the link goes down for whatever reason. And you will have no way to know when it will be back, nor can you do anything about except shout on the phone.
IT has a cost. Putting data in the Cloud does not remove that cost. It does, however, remove your control over it to place it in the hands of you don't know who.
I cannot imagine anyone thinking that that is a good idea.
Well duh, that's what you get when use Google's API everywhere.
Apparently, someone should tell Getty that it is possible, as a poster above has already said, to control web spider acces to one's site. I remember 15 years ago having found out that a page on my own personal website was being displayed somewhere else without any credits to me and without copying the entire frame, just the data they wanted, so that everyone would think it was their own page. I quickly found out how to force them to display my entire page, with my header and logo.
If I can do that all by my lonesome, I do believe a company, let alone Getty, would have the means to do something about Google's image copying.
The aforementioned company has been using the grsecurity name all over its marketing material and blog posts
If that is the case, the why, when I search for "grsecurity", do I only find sites that discuss a version of the product, or its merits, and no sites that say that they're using it in a product ? Or even a marketing page mentioning it ?
I get my TV from satellite transmission. If it can reliably get a signal to my satellite dish, then I do believe that my body is also "receiving" the signal.
I have no idea about the power of the satellite TV signal compared to that of my mobile phone or a WiFi transmitter, and I am quite ready to believe that the local sources are more powerful. However, I do seem to recall that only microwave ovens work at a frequency that can actually affect living matter; phone, satellite and radio pass through us and do not affect us.
Her condition is not physical, it is mental - but that doesn't mean she is not entitled to treatment, if there is any.
I find it hard to believe that any government anywhere would have a working quantum computer and there would be absolutely no knowledge of the fact.
It's like AI - we've been working on it for decades, we hear about a bit of progress every now and then, but there is no functional AI computer anywhere.
Quantum computing is more recent than AI, but is progressing faster - probably due to the fact that it is purely a physics challenge. Nevertheless, there is no functional quantum computer yet.
Congratulations to these kids. Most impressive.
Reminds me of the old saying : "when you don't know what you can't do, you don't know you can't do it, so you find a solution".
These kids are finding solutions, and proving to themselves that they can do it. That is the best confidence-builder there is. I can't wait to see what they'll come up with next.
Yeah, but thanks to Farmville it is a scam that is proven to work.
All you need is to gag, bind and blindfold your conscience in the basement before embarking on such a career knowing you could have made an actual, fun game and instead chose to get rich.
Well, you can't really blame the game makers. If there were only 10 people on this ball of mud willing to pay (and pay, and pay) to play, then this kind of gaming paradigm wouldn't be all that successful.
You had ONE good game, guys, so the plural is unnecessary and you should have stopped your sentence there.
Talk about success getting to one's head - this guy obviously thinks he deserves it for all his hard work. Actually, he just got lucky and is now up the creek wondering why he doesn't have a paddle.
There are so many bigwigs who think they succeeded. They then proceed to act like everything they think of is genius until it all comes crashing down around them. Then they blame the market conditions.
"the Germans instinctively flinched to the right [..] the Italians coming towards them made the matching mistake"
So two wrongs have finally made a right ;)
But that is exactly why I will never drive in the UK - I would be deathly scared of injuring someone (or worse) because my reflexes have been conditioned by more than 30 years of driving on the right.
Obviously. MS is using its own internal figures (that it never publishes) to justify the PR spiel.
What I'm interested in is the percentage of installs that revert to Windows 7, aka the only Windows worth using. Remember Vista ? Microsoft's PR department went nuts about installs as well, but in the end, everybody (well, everyone intelligent) removed it and put XP back.
I'm waiting for the final figures. Up to now, Windows 1 0 is eating into Windows 8 market share. It would really be quite a slap if Windows 7 didn't shrink in a notable manner.
It's called a business opportunity.
Because these days, anything that helps you shaft your competitors is fair game.
I'm sorry, you thought that morals are still important ? Come with me, I'll have you pass the Managerial Moral Vacuum Initiation certification, then you'll be fit to pass the Sold Your Soul To Capital certification and you'll make millions every year.
Agreed ? Don't bother signing, Vlad here will seal the deal with a little bite. You don't mind needles, do you ?
As a programming consultant, I have worked in just about every environment. The places I like to work the most are the ones where I can code on a dev server, but do not have access to the production server.
The benefits to that configuration are enormous. No more worrying about what my code is going to do, if it's a cockup, I just roll back the data and go back to the drawing board. I can debug to my heart's content, destroying the same data again and again until I get the whole procedure right. And when the code has been approved and is ready to be put into production, well I can't do that so if there is cockup then, it's no water on me.
When, on the other hand, I have to go and work on production environments (and it happens depressingly often, and not just in mom-and-pop shops), I take an inordinate amount of time in analyzing the code changes required, implementing as many safeguards as I possibly can and doing dry runs (no data change) until I'm as sure as I can be that nothing bad will happen. I hate working like that, but that's the job.
Just a thought : if I'm not mistaken, El Reg does not count votes on your posts when they're anonymous.
So, by trolling you anonymously, any downvotes they garner are not put to their total. Upvotes either, but given the amount of perfectly valid posts I wanted to upvote but were made anonymously, this does not seem to bother the people posting anonymously.
Unless, of course, they don't know either.
Obviously this person is intelligent enough to commandeer user accounts, set up spam rings, and adapt to the ever-changing Internet landscape, and yet stupid enough to never, ever stop even when it is clear that the feds have him on autodial.
That's something of a paradox.
A rather high cost, I think, because with that mark in her CV she's not going to get work anywhere near something with responsibility again. In fact, with all the background checking going on in recruitment in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if even McDonalds wouldn't want her.
And she won't be allowed to set up her own business either.
So she's now practically retired, and still has a million to pay back. Not exactly a good loan.
I absolutely agree. I want my personal equipment to be better than my work equipment. The day my company gets me a better PC than I have at home is . . well, never.
If the company requires that I have something (ie phone), the company pays for it. If the company can't pay for it, there's no law saying I have to. I'm quite happy to separate my personal equipment from company equipment. Avoids all the hassle of who's got whose data.
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