Posts by Pascal Monett

New Windows 10 Build 10122 aims to fix file association hijacking

That's because Microsoft knows what you need better than you do.

At least, that's what Microsoft thinks.

One more reason

One more reason for me to never ever install Windows 10. Except this is the clincher.

An OS is NOT supposed to be watching me, controlling what I do and reporting back to the mothership in order to find ways to sell me stuff. We have Google for that, thank you very much.

Windows 7 works fine. It will continue to do so despite MS retiring its support for it. Win7 is good enough for what I need doing, and I think it will be good enough for a while yet.

Meanwhile, other alternatives are becoming serious contenders. Open Source is definitely the future, and SteamOS is going to go live this year (I hope).

So, when Win7 finally kicks the bucket technically, I am betting that I just won't need Windows any more.

Good riddance.

Re: Windows [..] seems to default to giving the execute permission to everything

Oh it's much better than that actually. Windows gives permission to everything except yourself when you change the motherboard or reinstall it for whatever reason with your data directory outside of the OS partition (like all normal installations should be done).

Whenever you do that, you're in for days of finding out that you don't have permission to open a given folder you created in a previous install.

Thank $Deity for the Internet, geeks and TakeOwnership !

Re: "try something like Foxit"

I used to agree with that, but Foxit has become nag/adware and is getting naughty trying to trick you into installing things you don't need.

Sumatra is the current clean alternative.

404 Boss not found — Bye bye ICANN CEO Chehade

The difficult part . . .

Is not ICANN finding a successor, it's ICANN finding a successor that it will be able to shape to its twisted mentality.

I'm hoping the next person to step up to the position will purge the management by fire and set up something that is finally as honest, professional and transparent than what the world needs.

I also hope to win the Lottery someday. I think that just might be slightly more likely.

In any case, I propose myself as next ICANN CEO.

I surely can't do worse.

IN YOUR FACE, Linux and Apple fans! Oculus is Windows-only for now

With perseverance.

Public prosecutor waves big stick at German spies over NSA data slurp claims

Re: "what a joke the US intelligence services have become."

The only joke is the way they are playing fast and loose with the spirit of the law and the respect of the Bill Of Rights.

For the rest, I am quite sure the intelligence services of the USA are quite efficient in their data-gathering.

"Quelle surprise."

Close enough though.

Why OH WHY is economics so bleedin' awful, then?

Re: Whats this elites anyway?

Is it the people we buy goods from or the people we willingly elect into government?

How touchingly quaint.

The elites today are the people of influence, i.e. the people with money or with the capacity to influence the people with money. The people with money tell governments what they want, and your elected muppets do what they say.

Democracy ? It's a great idea. To work, The People need to do more than watch sports on the telly and complain about whoever it is they didn't elect.

ICANN's bill for clawing global DNS from Uncle Sam: $7m and counting

When is this farce going to end ?

Until what point can ICANN push the boundaries until somebody finally wakes up and puts a stake through it ?

The ICANN board is the height of hubris, hypocrisy, and borderline corruption - hardly what is needed to administer a world resource.

Kill it with fire.

Console makers game the EU Commission to avoid energy-use law

Re: hardware changed infrequently

WTF ?

Several decades ago I was upgrading my PC every year, and it was worth it. I was benchmarking my rig every time, just to see how much better it had become.

Since 2009 I have made 2 upgrades. I don't bother benchmarking any more, an improvement of 5-6fps is not noticeable. What is noticeable is the comfort that 32GB of DDR3 RAM brings, along with two 180GB SSDs.

The only lazyness that developers have grown into concerns resources. Back then they needed 512KB of RAM because gaming was as demanding as anything else when you have next to nothing. These days, they expect you to have 16GB of DDR3 because hey, it's not expensive.

Here's why the Pentagon is publishing its cyber-warfare rulebook – if China hasn't already hacked in and read it

We get it

The US Government will do what it wants for whatever reason it finds. History proves that the US Gov is capable of making up reasons if it doesn't find any actual ones.

Heck, they invaded a country on made-up reasons, don't try to impress me with innuendo on cyber stuff.

I like the way they took the Cold War lingo and just straight use it the same in the field of cyberwar. Unacceptable losses ? You mean you're going to take down a router ?

Ooohhh, scary.

Astroboffins mine data in pursuit of lonely, homeless RUNAWAY GALAXIES

"use the power of the archives"

Now that's something I'm going to have to remember.

use the power of the archives

use the power of the archives

use the power of the archives

use the power of the archives

. . .

Yahoo! Mail! goes! titsup! in! Blighty! due! to! mystery! error!

"Yahoo! Mail is not experiencing an outage"

That's actually a refreshing difference from the usual "only a small amount of subscribers are experiencing issues" that is usually trotted out.

Of course, in the case of Yahoo!, they'd have trouble talking about a small number of subscribers, since that's all they have.

Re: Ok I do

If only they were actual Russian beauties . . .

Hubble hits 25th anniversary IN SPAAACE – time for telescope to come home

We might be pissing ourselves, and we might even be in the same retirement home, but we'll be watching astounding achievements not hindered by government red tape.

I just hope we'll be aware enough to realize what those pretty images on the screen mean.

Internet kingmakers drop ego, devise future of DNS, IP addys etc

"the internet community is convinced"

Yeah, the internet community is also convinced that online petitions are actually useful.

I say no. Anything that is under the authority of ICANN is tainted and cannot be trusted, just as ICANN cannot be trusted to anything that its board thinks is contrary to its interests (hint: nothing to do with running the Internet).

The board of ICANN should be suspended, charged and tried for criminal entente, profiteering and not respecting its own charter.

Personally, I'd take them all behind the chemical shed to have them shot.

Put some new blood in there, someone who actually gives a hoot about the Internet and not just about lining his pockets. In this case, the enemy you don't know can't be worse than the ICANN board.

Can't wait to bonk with Apple? Then try an Android phone

Re: it's up to you

Theoretically yes. In practice, well it gets a bit more difficult.

Yes, it's up to you to ensure that the number on the register is the one you're expecting. That said, a confirmation on the screen of your phone is entirely reasonable and justified.

Especially since this whole thing is going to run on code that you will never, ever see, much less be authorized to debug.

But hey, I'm never going to bonk with a phone, so I'll leave you to find out what happens when things go wrong.

Hadoop ODP: No thanks says MapR, and Cloudera isn't impressed either

Re: I wonder why it took the CEO of MapR several months to respond to ODP

Maybe it is because he took his time reviewing the situation and making sure his opinion was founded ?

Hopefully, that's the reason.

Disk drive shipment numbers set to spin down

Outrageous prices ? Really ?

Let me see :

1996 : 2.1GB for €285.70, €136/GB

1997 : 4.3GB for €468.52, €108.96/GB

1998 : 2GB for €190.63, €95/GB

1999 : 13GB for €248.65, €19/GB

2001 : 30GB for €396.38, €13.2/GB

2001 : 40GB for €272.43, €6.8/GB

2002 : 80GB for €400, €5/GB

2002 : 120GB for €254, €2.11/GB

2003 : 80GB for €145, €1.8/GB

2004 : 200GB for €169, €0.85/GB

2005 : 200GB for €120, €0.60/GB

2007 : 320GB for €89, €0.28/GB

2010 : 1000GB for €89, €0.09/GB

2013 : 2000GB for €179.85, €0.09/GB

2014 : 3000GB for €111.95, €0.04/GB

Yeah, fucking outrageous.

(prices based on my personal experience - I still have the tickets)

Licence to chill: Ex-CIA spyboss Petraeus gets probation for leaking US secrets to his mistress

Yes [Prime] Minister nailed it

That is because Yes Minister was not a comedy show, it is a documentary.

There is no part of politics that this series left untouched, and every single thing they said in it is valid for all time until the end of the Universe, because the people who made that series touched on the fundamental behavior of the human soul which will never change.

God Bless them.

Now I've got to go and watch it again.

Citrix decides to share its WAN optimisation with the world

Citrix's schtick is that [they say] they can get away with DSL or even 4G connections

And then they sell you a solution that acts like it was on a 56kbps line.

Windows 10 Device Guard: Microsoft's effort to keep malware off PCs

Where did I say that the demise of Windows was imminent ?

What I said is that the demise of Windows is now inevitable.

But the coffers of Microsoft are such that said demise is going to take a bloody long time.

Even though some might say that it has started.

"If that enterprise wants to sign bad stuff, they are entitled to do that"

So, just another layer of buggy crap wrapped around a bad idea that will change next to nothing for the user, unless it is the need for a more powerful CPU and yet more RAM because of the resource hog that this thing is going to be.

And when that solution has been proven to be useless and just as subvertible as anything else MS has tried, what next ? ANOTHER layer of software firewalled by hardware to ensure that the previous one is not bugged ?

Windows will not die because some other OS takes its market share by storm, it's going to die fibrillating in the throes of its own morass, and other OSes will just have to fill the void.

Ransomware crims drop Bitcoin faster than Google axes services

Nice to know

And I completely agree with the practice. Just out of curiosity, what tape drive do you use on your personal PC at home ? Oh, none ? What I thought.

Your data backup solution is perfect for the business area, I've seen it used (and have been part of the support personnel for it) many times.

Now tell me how many home users you know make backups. Personally, I put that tally at 3 : myself and my two best friends. We are all computer-savvy, and two of us work in the IT industry. Even though, nobody I know uses tape. Optical backups are the norm in the home user area. Some mistaken souls use hard disks, they will find the error of their ways the hard way.

I doubt very much that the ransomware business targets mostly businesses. The home user is the biggest market, and one that is easiest to infiltrate because by definition home users are not computer-savvy and, generally, only become aware of the risk once they have been bitten.

LA schools want multi-million Apple refund after kids hack iPads

"there have been challenges"

Yup.

Challenge #1: imagining that school children would play nice. Result ? FAIL.

Challenge #2: thinking that your code was resistant enough to keep children in the straight and narrow. Result ? FAIL.

Challenge #3: persuading people that not being able to use the core component of the tool (accessing educational content) is just a challenge. Result ? ABJECT FAIL.

Challenge #4: Persuading the police that you had no idea that your insufficiently tested platform was going to be such a clusterfuck. Result ? PENDING.

And, as for standing by your performance, I sure hope you will be made to. All the way to prison.

DTS announces DTS:X – sparks object-based audio war with Dolby

Re: Harry could be talking in English, but Hermione in Swedish

Yes, technically it probably could.

Unfortunately, copyright laws and their assorted wolfish lawyers will dumb down the tech and you'll never be able to actually use DTS:X to its full potential.

Not unless you unlock those abilities with a patch, obviously, but then you become a filthy pirate for wanting to actually use your material the way you intend to.

WORLD+DOG line up to SLAM Google after anti-trust case unveiled

Nobody forces you

It's just that almost 3 people out of 4 do.

And the biggest alternative to Google is currently Baidu, capturing the Chinese market. You do your searches in Chinese ? Don't think so.

So you're down to the 2nd-biggest alternative, Yahoo!, with just over 6% of market share. That's 1 person out of 20. Bing is 1 point less. What is left, your ad infinitum if you prefer, is 1% all wet. So that means that 1 out of 10 non-Chinese people do not use Google.

Which, conversely, means that 9 out of 10 non-Chinese people use Google. And Chinese people use Baidu.

Google has a monopoly on search results. Baidu has a monopoly on Chinese search results.

Nobody else counts.

Boost your attachment size with this one weird trick

Re: Not everyone is connected to the local network

I said "a network location".

Nothing there means "local network", but I rather like that you took that as a given.

No, never increase attachment size limits

Make it zero. Please kill that despicable tendency everyone has to mail files around.

Business knowledge is lost in email. It must be properly filed on a network location, and email only serving links to the latest version.

All this attachment emailing is the best way to lose information or lose time finding it. Stop it.

Hybrid IT? Not a long-term thing, says AWS CTO

the consequences [of a] global outage [...] become correspondingly more severe

Once there was the Mainframe, and all cables led to it. The Mainframe never slept, never stopped, always answered. Except when it didn't.

Then there was the PC, and Mankind learned that distributed computing could be a Good Thing (TM).

Now there is The Cloud (TM), and all cables eventually lead to it, except when a backhoe breaks the link, a hacker gets to the DNS, a DDOS prevents access, or some internal update procedure is screwed up (eh, Microsoft ?).

Funny how we insist on inserting single points of failure in business-critical procedures.

Sort of, yeah.

Except for the fact that no US company can guarantee security from a National Security letter.

Or even a US judge, for that matter.

But I'm sure that's not important, eh ?

IBM’s 700TB security threat database enters the cloud. Look to the heavens, hackers

Um, wait a minute

"images and details of more than a million IP addresses linked to hacking"

Okay, I want to put the scum down as much as anyone else, but isn't there a conflict with personal data there ? Do they have the right to go and publish such data just like that ?

I mean, somebody might learn that his neighbor's address is in there and go all rambo on him or something, then the ensuing investigation reveals that it was a mistake, but too late for the innocent neighbor.

Exaggerating, of course, but still . . . is publishing data like that allowed ?

Exchange Server 2016 will be mostly Cloud Exchange ported back on-premises

That is reassuring. Thank you for the response.

So, like console ports, Microsoft is developing for "the cloud" first, then every now and then porting some of that to the "non-cloud", with all the uncertainties that such a move entails.

Did I get that right ?

Exchange 2016 is going to be in the cloud, but you can pretend you have it on-premise even though there will be a part in the cloud. Is that right ?

Well if it is, we're going to see just exactly how important all that privacy stuff actually is, because if it is important, companies will be avoiding that version like the plague.

NASA probe sent to faraway planet finds DWARF world instead: Pics

Yup

Science is marvelous, when properly employed, ain't it ?

Nvidia's GTX 900 cards lock out open-source Linux devs yet again

A solution for the wrong problem

"to prevent grey market dealers from flashing modified firmware onto cheap graphics cards with low-end GPUs, then passing them off as the high-end versions"

A card sold as a high-end version that barely breaks 60fps will be decried and slaughtered on the Internet in no time. That is not a proper justification for NVidia to put a chastity belt on its software.

The bitter truth is that the Linux community is still just a bump on the gaming road. As long as that is the case, Nvidia will be able to ignore them and run them over ruthlessly without impacting their bottom line.

When the Steam OS comes of age, when Microsoft will be just a souvenir in the minds of gamers, then Nvidia will be singing another tune entirely. Not before.

2550100 ... An Illuminati codeword or name of new alliance demanding faster Ethernet faster?

Yeah, but that was back in the day when nobody was using Internet.

These days, everybody wants to stream, chat and Facebook all at the same time. These days we have HD TV over Internet, which needs at least a 10MB line to be barely watchable.

Bandwidth is in short supply, everybody wants more. No executive that can lounge around a pool is going to risk his bonus restricting that.

Not any more.

WHAT did GOOGLE do SO WRONG to get a slapping from the EU?

Poseurs will pose.

Nuclear fusion simulator among boffinry tools picked for monster Summit supercomputer

"Models seismic wave propagation through"

Um, through what exactly ?

And, pray tell, but what source other than thermonuclear power drives supernovae ?

Come now, you didn't really think that you could slip that by unnoticed on this site, now did you ?

There's TOO MANY data-leaking healthcare firms, growls Symantec

Almost lookes like hospital staff do not know IT

And, on the face of it, I think I rather prefer it that way.

Okay, sure, patient data should be safeguarded and all that, I agree. But you can't really blame the staff for taking more care of patients than of their computers.

Yes, the situation has to change. I'm sure the orderly who is on his second 24-hour shift in a row would agree. I'm also sure that hospital management could do a lot better.

But let's face it, a hospital is a leaky dam at best, and everybody is running around trying to plug all the holes at once most of the time.

I'm not surprised that IT issues find themselves at the bottom of the stack.

However, people who integrate hospitals to abuse the system and sell off patient data should be jailed.

For a long time.

Google’s plan for WORLD DOMINATION takes shape. And it begins with a patent

That is true today, but what about tomorrow ?

Android lands on Microsoft's money-machine island fortress

Uh, we're talking ATM's here, not PCs.

The software better fucking be able to use the hardware, else there's a lawsuit for unfit-for-purpose in the wings that's just begging to fly.

AC is just trolling, ignore him.

COME BACK – I never said we were quitting public cloud, says HP bigwig Bill Hilf

It's HP

Who cares what their strategy is ?

They're dying anyway.

EU says dominant Google illegally alters search results

People can use other search engines

That's Google's response. And it is true, people can use other search engines.

The fact is, most of them don't.

So just because there are other search engines does not excuse Google from a bit of fairness in the market.

On the other hand, I'd be interested in learning how exactly a search result can favor Google (or not). Google has its paid adverts on the top, which I accept because it is their site and they can do as they wish, but I always skip those. The normal results are never sites belonging to Google anyway, so how can Google be "favored" by a particular result ?

Dwarf planet Ceres has TEN bright spots, astroboffins say

Which means it had to happen !

It's 2015 and a RICH TEXT FILE or a HTTP request can own your Windows machine

LibreOffice does everything I need it to, and it's free.

Incomprehensible boffins bring quantum computers a step closer

We are now one step closer

to the positronic brain.

But really, influencing atoms with local electric charges, turning the knob by modulating the voltage, this all sounds more Star Trekky than Star Trek itself.

I just hope nobody's going to reverse the polarity....