Posts by Pascal Monett

Internet of Things: Major players agree on goals, but little else

Re: "Without focused commercialization efforts .."

In other words, if somebody else doesn't do the job right, we won't continue swimming in money.

Delaying Abundance, really ? And with a capital A, no less ? The only thing that is going to generate Abundance is controlled nuclear fusion. Nothing else has the potential to do that. Trying to pass off IoT as a generator of infinite wealth is beyond moronic, it is criminal.

That paper just proves that this whole IoT fad is just another money grab.

On the other hand, those guys are slick, I must admit. This fad is only just starting and they have already found their excuse for when the purported "wealth" does not materialize (the commercialization efforts were not focused enough).

CNN 'tech analyst' on NAKED CELEBS: WHO IS this mystery '4chan' PERSON?

Typical CNN-level broadcast

And the "expert" is highly qualified as well - for CNN that is.

NASA clears zero-G 3D printer for mission to SPAAAAACE

3D printing of plastic is not going to save anyone

The idea of printing replacement parts is fine, but it will have to use materials that have much better durability than plastic if we are to be able to use it in a colonization scenario.

A full-fledged colony will have to have mining utensils, maybe even mining machines, smelters, smithies and metalworkers. It might even be a good idea to stay low-tech as much as possible - if a colony bases its management on tablets and spreadsheets then everything will grind to halt when the equipment fails.

But for a proof-of-concept phase, this is definitely a good idea.

Sony backs AllSeen Alliance in Internet of Stuff standards slap-fight

I'm just wondering...

.. how Sony is going to manage to crowbar Java in that thing.

Because they'll try, I'm sure of that.

Hot Celebrity? Stash of SELFIES where you're wearing sweet FA? Get 2FA. Now

Re: INSTEAD OF AN 'AGE RATING' TO JOIN SITES....

What's that ? Common sense ? Man, this the 3rd millennium, there's none of that stuff left.

And making users complete a test in order to sign up to a service is just putting a big roadblock on your highway to money.

Not gonna happen.

'Sony and Twitch' hacking crew Lizard Squad: 'We quit'

"experience the raw thrill of anarchy"

These morons need to take a bit of their copious free time to check the definition of anarchy.

It is not destroying everyone else's toys. Anarchy is a system where no law is needed because everyone does what is needed when it is needed without having to be prodded into doing it by law.

But, given their actions, it is obvious that the notion of true anarchy is something well above their level of intelligence.

Flurry of solar flare-ups sets off cosmic plasma explosion

I must agree that I would appreciate a bit of consistency. If one starts with metric units to quantify something, I have always found it irritating to see the next measurement in imperial units, or vice-versa.

Let's at least stick to one system of measurement, please ?

Oh, and one other thing : I very much doubt that the Sun can only spew forth a paltry hundred million tons at a time. The wiki page on CMEs states that average mass is 1.6×10^12kg (i.e. 1.6 billion tons), and that that measurement is a lower limit because of the detection method.

SHARE 'N' SINK: OneDrive corrupting Office 2013 files

Impressive

Once upon a time, Microsoft only managed to make its Office files incompatible with older versions.

Now, Microsoft has made its own Office files incompatible between its own OSes !

Now that's what I call progress !

Microsoft changes cert test providers, hints at fun new exams

I would love a test environment like that. As a developer, give me the specifications of something that tests my knowledge of the product and the operations needed to fulfil the requirements and let me prove that I can do it in the allotted time.

But I can understand that mass-certification cannot be done like that. You need a dev or server environment for every candidate, and for some admin tests you need more than one server and maybe servers in different states. Setting up such an environment would be a logistical nightmare and would be prohibitively costly, not to mention evaluating the result would have to be done by a committee instead of a test server automatically validating checkbox answers. And you would obviously have complaints about results.

I don't think that Azure will help in any way in this matter, but I sure wish somebody could make something like that work.

One thing is sure : nobody could criticize a cert like that anymore !

Siri: Helpful personal assistant or SERIAL APP KILLER?

Type your question ?

HA! HA! HAA!

Excuse me, but people in cinemas already have apparently extreme difficulty in turning the bloody things off, so I seriously doubt that that is going to be a widely-used option.

KER-CHING! CryptoWall ransomware scam rakes in $1 MEEELLION

Not worth the time.

$10,000 ??

I hope that person at least receives faxes now and then.

Telling me that my PDF Suite has been activated, or that I missed a fax, is like telling me that my lost dog has been found.

I don't have a dog.

Uber, Lyft and cutting corners: The true face of the Sharing Economy

Except that Uber drivers are not Licensed Minicabs either, if I read the article correctly.

Euro banks will rip out EVERYTHING and buy proper backend systems ... LOL, fooled ya

OK, can we cut it out with the cloudy bull already ?

A "private cloud" ? Is that all they could come up with ?

All Fortune 1000 companies already have private clouds - it's called internal servers, for fucks' sake. Somebody needs to stop smoking the carpet.

Any bank that puts banking data of any kind into the hands of any 3rd-party supplier, be it IBM, is a bank I will not have ANY dealings with.

You go on and put your private life, family pictures and whatever else you want on the cloud - your business, your decision, you deal with the consequences.

MY stuff stays as private as I can manage it, thank you.

Software bug caught Galileo sats in landslide, no escape from reality

I don't think that the problem is there

I think that whatever the cause between the two does not matter.

What does matter is that there was insufficient oversight to detect and correct the problem.

Okay, this is rocket science, but we're not talking about an exploded rocket, we're talking about a string of errors that are purely due to bureaucratic incompetence. That somebody made a mistake is understandable, that nobody caught the mistake and flagged it for correction is not. One does not just go and upload flight parameters for a multi-million-dollar satellite without double-checking, then triple-checking said parameters. And the checking is not supposed to be done by the same person !

Come on, ESA, you've done better than this already. Call SES if you need some pointers on how to manage a fleet of satellites - they've been doing it right for more than a decade now.

'Stop dissing Google or quit': OK, I quit, says Code Club co-founder

Britain has a glorious past, there is no doubt about that.

Unfortunately, it is all in the past.

And you can say that about quite a few countries, these days.

I am starting to wonder if our "modern" society is all that great. It seems to me that a model that cannot foster elements capable of sustaining the model is doomed to failure, and our current model has not produced anything near the enlightened, egalitarian world we were promised after WWII. Today, it's all about how soon I can get the next shiny, and if children are slaving away in poor countries to produce it well that's not my problem.

That's not my problem. It is that attitude that brought us here, and now we're all in trouble. And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.

She was right

The Code Club homepage specifically states : "A nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11".

It is volunteer-led. You don't tell volunteers what to say or how to speak. If you don't agree with what they say, YOU leave.

So kudos to her.

In an ideal world, when such pressure was applied, the Board should have been united in simply ignoring this nonsense. This is obviously a case where the Board is comprised of less volunteers than besuited yes-men standing at attention when Number 10 makes a call.

Not a good point for the "Club".

Feds salute plucky human ROBOT-FIGHTERS

Re: "You can't cheat an honest man"

Being honest is not a scam-prevention shield.

Paranoia is better for that, paranoia and mistrust.

A truly honest man will lack the instinctive mistrust one must apply to all marketing spiel and will be at risk of naively thinking that said spiel-spinner is actually proposing a good deal.

Of course, being honest does not mean being a fool, but there are some pretty slick schemes out there and some you'll only catch on to when you've been hit by them, unless a friend warns you about it.

On the other hand, you can only fool an honest man once. Once the honest man has you pegged as a liar and a cheat, he won't listen to you any more.

TROLL SLAYER Google grabs $1.3 MEEELLION in patent counter-suit

Their website is just one image, no links, no text, no nothing.

Man, sometimes I regret the good old days when useless trash like that was kneecapped instead of collecting royalties.

Researchers camouflage haxxor traps with fake application traffic

Except that, in this case, the roaches can read up on the trap procedures, since the documentation is online.

Does that defeat the purpose ?

Microsoft boots 1,500 dodgy apps from the Windows Store

Look at the bright side

WinPhone users know that they are part of the 1% (of the market) !

And that backfired spectacularly.

Oz fed police in PDF redaction SNAFU

The only benefit of PDF is that it is not modifiable.

That is why it is so widely used.

Twitter gives ANALYTICS to the unwashed masses

Oh the Alpha cast is there.

Just not on Twitter.

Oz biz regulator discovers shared servers in EPIC FACEPALM

Ignorance of the Law is not an excuse

But government has a right to ignore anything and there's nothing you can do about it.

Major cyber attack hits Norwegian oil industry

This cannot continue

Infrastructure attacks on state resources cannot be tolerated, Internet or not.

It is interesting to witness the rise in frequency of this kind of thing. A DDOS on Twitter, or Netflick, annoying as it may be to the users of those services, is not a national security issue. An attack on critical infrastructure is, and governments have a tendency to not put up with that kind of nonsense.

I am almost hoping that this kind of attack will continue in order for critical infrastructure to get its ducks in a row and get the hell off the Internet. The Internet offers near-anonymity in this kind of attack, that anonymity disappears as soon as you have to dial a specific number to log on. Not to mention that DDOS is just not possible anymore, so that's two birds with one stone.

So go on being nuisances, you stupid script kiddies and botlords. In the end, you'll be doing us all a service by forcing our governments to make things more secure.

Boffins attempt to prove the universe is just a hologram

Re: probably already has

And it probably will again.

"the world we see around us [..] may be real"

It may be, but there sure are a truckload of delusional people in it.

HUGE iPAD? Maybe. HUGE ADVERTS? That's for SURE

"Now you can deliver highly engaging ads ..."

Ah, another adberg on the horizon. Thank you for the warning.

I will steer well clear of this iThingy.

Finally, a practical use for 3D printing: Helping surgeons rehearse

From what I gathered in the article, this 3D thing is being used to print the bones that are to be worked on.

I don't think that bone structure changes all that much in a week.

Google kicks PowerPoint in the fondleslab

"You’re on the subway with no reception "

If that is the case then I fail to see where Google is going to help.

Unless, of course, you answer that you can make the modification locally and it will be automatically synchronized as soon as you get a connection again.

In which case I know several other products that can bring me to the same result without giving all my data to The Google.

Six of the best gaming keyboard and mouse combos

Functionality remains poor

This article just reminds me how lacking we are in choices for gaming goodness.

Okay, so this was an article about keyboards and rodents, fine. Nonetheless, the functionality we are given to choose from is still the same : one peripheral to manage aiming (the mouse), and one to manage everything else (movement, weapon choices, spell/techniques/etc).

Fine, I agree, we only have two hands. This is where I long for an updated version of the Microsoft Strategic Commander (review still online here). To those of you who ask what this can be used for, I have one example to give you : any FPS shooter.

What is the major complaint for all FPS gamers ? After an hour of gaming, the middle finger (used for pressing the Q to advance) is simply begging to stop. Of course, since all FPS shooters today punish the camper, everybody is used to moving all the time, so pressing Q to advance is a continuous job. In addition, doing anything else practically requires you to stop advancing because you lift your finger off Q in order to mash something else - even if you use another finger to do it.

Replace all this button mashing with the Strategic Commander and you can play four hours straight without killing your fingers anymore. When basic movement is mapped to a mouse-like support, you're just pushing the movable part of the Commander forward to move instead of mashing down on a key - and that is much less effort. Plus, the programmable keys allow you to keep moving while you use the corresponding functions - thus diminishing the window of opportunity that enemies use so readily.

Obviously, I'm not saying that it turns you into a gaming god - but it lets you play longer and more relaxed, and that has to count.

I can't believe that such a positive peripheral has been so unnoticed by the gaming community.

I'm going to buy a new one soon - there's a key on mine that got a bit iffy around mid-2013.

Yes, I bought it in 2001.

THAT's quality.

Three quarters of South Korea popped in online gaming raids

Re: why login with their Facebook account

Seems quite understandable to me. Each web site requires identifier and password. Security bods all over are always harping on about having a different password for everything.

But people are bad at making up passwords, and worse at remembering them.

So Facebook (Google is too) are offering this as a service - log on with them and you don't need to remember any other password.

Except that then it opens you to the single point of failure problem, so it is not actually a solution.

New Snowden leak: How NSA shared 850-billion-plus metadata records

Moment of nostalgia

Remember the Hunt for Red October ?

Specifically, the part where Ramius (Connery) is discussing their future plans with his second-in-command, who, at one point, asks "You can travel from one state to another, freely ?" and Ramius answers "Yes, state to state".

My memory is not perfect on that exchange, but the gist is that the US was once a country where the government was not concerned where its citizens were at any given time, whereas Soviet Russia was controlling anyone who wanted to travel outside of their current state. The exchange was a reminder of the level of control Soviet Russia exerted on its citizens, the amount of freedom its citizens did not have.

And now, welcome to USA 2.0 (*) - where the NSA controls not only your whereabouts 24/7, but also who you talk to, when you do it and for how long.

(*) - package available for export on request, no hurry, plenty of models available for all budgets - get a tailor-made version for your country now !

Harvard boffins 'reverse-engineer' Chinese censorship

Logical

In order to best guarantee state control, keeping the masses from massing is a requirement.

Therefor, any sign that people are grouping together is an alert condition. Under no condition must people do anything together, or they will understand that they have strength like that.

The People must not be allowed to understand their strength in order for the State to be in proper control.

Judge nixes HP deal for director amnesty after $8.8bn Autonomy snafu

Another useless exercise

Initially I was rather encouraged by the fact that HP is not going to be able to make a backroom deal and quietly bury as much of this mess it can. I like the thought that things will be said in court, publicly, instead of being hushed up.

But then it hit me and I realized that it won't make a shred of difference anyway. As has been said in this very thread, Meg has already botched a billion dollar acquisition, now she's responsible for two of them. Once upon a time, failing anything with a billion dollar price tag on it was followed by bowing out and leaving the job to someone else. Nowadays, the high-flyers make colossal mistakes and are faced with barely a threat, while they throw out the small fry in droves as soon as someone forgot the correct amount of postage, or something else equally trivial.

And it's not just HP, it's the entire corporate culture of today. Ballmer lead by example here. During his tenure there were many failures, some quite expensive, yet he kept the helm and bowed out only when he decided to. In other times, recognizing Microsoft's failure to comprehend the importance of the Internet would already have been his ticket out. Of course, it's a bit more difficult to oust a major shareholder, I recognize that, but that's the whole point. If Ballmer stayed so long despite an ever-increasing string of (expensive) failures, it is precisely because he was a major shareholder.

Meg is not. So why is she still in place ? How is it that she was allowed to throw almost 9 billion away ? Where is her acknowledgement of responsibility ?

The higher the pay, the more exacting the requirement of performance. That is how it should be. When you're being paid a million dollars a month, the result should be no less than perfection.

It clearly has not been.

6 Obvious Reasons Why Facebook Will Ban This Article (Thank God)

Stop spying on my life !

Except for the remark on women, I agree with the rest of your post.

I understand where you're coming from, though.

The police are WRONG: Watching YouTube videos is NOT illegal

I fully agree with your position on this matter.

Unfortunately, I am aware that there are people who revel in this kind of stuff. There is also the political aspect of this video that must be taken into account : it is in the interest of the terrorists to bring our attention to this act and make us petition our government to (hopefully) cave to the terrorist demands in order to make it stop.

Re: guilty till proved innocent

Yeah, they still bother with that "proven innocent" part for the moment.

Soon, they'll just be guilty.

Re: What about staging a similar scene in a film?

Yes, what about SAW ?

I hate the premise and despise the series, but it has been rather successful.

Your move, sucker! Microsoft tests cloud gaming system that cuts through network lag

Do they also predict the headshot ?

250ms of movement in advance, cool.

What happens to the inevitable aimbot-generated headshot ? Will it still hit, or will it finally start missing ?

Sony DENIES PlayStation Network WOBBLES despite gamer GRIPES

Re: "Maybe PS will realize money isn't the only thing."

But they know that. There's also CONTROL, and they want BOTH.

Wall Street's internet darlings require an endless supply of idiots

Re: Do I get paid for washing the dishes at home?

Yes you do. You get the payoff of clean dishes to eat in. If you don't wash them, you get the payoff of not doing the work (of course, you still have dirty dishes).

Your example would have been better if you talked about washing your neighbour's dishes.

I’ve never paid for it in my life... we are talking Wi-Fi, right?

Not his fault you chose a bad provider.

Galileo, Galileo! Galileo, Galileo! Galileo fit to go. Magnifico

I respectfully disagree

There are now two GPS providers to choose from, the US one and Galileo.

Saying Galileo GPS is thus specifying which one you're talking about, which can be useful if you need to be precise. We're going to have to find a name for the US one.

Forrester says it's time to give up on physical storage arrays

Sure, these days it's sexy to go to the cloud, we got the memo.

When enough companies have been burnt by connections failing at the worst possible moment, or providers on the fritz for days on end, or simply disappearing from one day to the next, you'll see a move backwards and enterprise storage on premise will have a resurgence.

Nothing new under the sun. We started IT with mainframes and dumb terminals, then we got PCs and distributed computing, then we returned to central servers (but not mainframes). Now, the Internet is driving us back to dumb terminals, and the cloud will supplement that with virtual storage.

Looks like we're going back to mainframe days, but these days it's called cloud.

Someday, we'll backpedal on that too. It's inevitable.

Re: The new physics

The Internet is reliable.

It's the connection to it that is not, either on your side, or on the side of your service provider (not your ISP, I mean the server providing the service you want to use).

Pedals and wheel in that Google robo-car or it's off the road – Cali DMV

Re: "the technology is viable"

Of course it is viable. We will have driverless cars in the future, I have no doubt of that.

Some people here are comparing this technology with their own experience in IT. I'll wager that none of those people have had a hand in aircraft AI development. As I work in IT, I can understand that, generally speaking, nobody wants the average programmer to get anywhere near an application that is supposed to handle controlling a vehicle that contains people, or goes near people. Given the generally poor level of exception handling and the very limited foresight of most programs, it would indeed be suicide to leave such a task to the average developer.

I am confident that the automotive industry has an enormous amount of data and experience in car behaviour, and I am convinced that Google is not learning everything from scratch. Google must have experienced automotive consultants on this project, and I am certain that Google has a comprehensive list of use cases to test with its autoAI.

Not that I think that Google is a saintly organisation that is doing all this out of the pureness of its heart. We all know now that Google is an advocate of DRM, on top of being the most common spook in our lives. No, if I think that Google is doing its best to make a truly safe, automated car, it is because it would be commercial suicide if it put a half-assed solution on the road that started running over kids.

Not even the fortune of a Brin would avoid prison for that. It would be the ruin of several very wealthy billionaires, and I don't think they would like the idea of being ruined and in jail.

I look forward to a future where Google knows where everyone goes before they get there, in order to better target the relevant ads to us - because it's "what the customer wants" (the customer, in this case, being the companies that want eyeballs on their ads, of course).

Brainboxes caught opening Bitcoin fraud emails. Seriously, guys?

Usual precaution applies

Never assume intelligence on the Internet.

It may happen now and then, but it is not the norm.

BAT-GOBBLING urban SPIDER QUEENS swell to ENORMOUS SIZE

"had bigger ovaries than relatives in the bush"

I do NOT want to know how she found that out.