Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
You have. You have gone back to a time when providers and large companies did not have the luxury of scrutinizing my life and finely tuning their advertising to correspond to what they think my desires are.
And you know what, Tim ? As far as I'm concerned, it's going to stay like that. I want my TV to be a dumb box, because the dumber it is, the less you will learn about me.
And that suits me fine, because you're NOT my friend.
That you know of.
Active Directory is not the only authentication tool available. The biggest network on the planet is called the Internet, it runs fine and Active Directory is not part of it. Check out the technologies that allow the Internet to work and you will find that Microsoft is not the one-stop shop you think it is.
As for calendaring and scheduling, well I have to agree that Outlook has the market pretty much sewn up, but there are actually alternatives now, for those who don't have MS blinkers on, and there will be more in the future because, like it or not, FOSS is here to stay.
A patent is supposed to describe something useful that has never been made before.
The glass door has prior art.
Revolving doors have prior art
Cylinders with logos inside have prior art.
Why this got patented is just another failure in the system.
Copyright I could understand. Patent I cannot.
Because of the 4th reason Wikibon did not list : managers jumping willy-nilly on the bandwagon to not look like they're behind the times.
Now they're just going to look stupid. Especially those who played the "I'm smarter than you all because I'm managing a Big Data project" card.
I have no pity for them either.
One difference : people have to eat, they do not have to look for bugs for Yahoo!.
Another difference : grocers are not paying people to come buy their wares.
Please do not take offense, but your grocer analogy is wrong on just about every level. That said, I do believe that it is rather difficult to make any kind of analogy with the Internet Security scene, because it is the only "market' in the world where people can work for a company without obligation, a contract or any legal framework.
And automated voice calls, no less.
Automated.
Since when is security automated ?
This whole cloud thing is already quite nebulous as far as security is concerned, and now they announce bollocks like that.
Well that does NOT inspire confidence in cloud security as far as I'm concerned.
Far from me the idea of criticizing this breakthrough - anything that can potentially increase my computing power rates an automatic thumbs up as far as I'm concerned.
That said, I am a bit worried about sentences like the one in the title. Computers use electricity, and electricity can be a finicky beast - which is why we try to herd it as much as possible when we make use of it. So, reading that they are making computing parts without even knowing about defects is somewhat disturbing to me.
I mean, couldn't this be cause for unexplained behaviour in program results when the chip is used in production ?
Could someone enlighten me ?
I totally agree with your logic, but I must point out the fallacy in your opinion : real world problems require real world solutions - and that typically demands time and resources allocated to solve the issue.
The Internet is an exception. On the Internet, anything possible is a fair target, whether or not it is morally or legally justified. That is why you have ebook stores that can go and wipe a title you purchased from your Kindle (or whatever). In the real world, that would mean sending someone to your house to wait for your permission to come in and take back the book - permission which you would be at liberty to not give. But, because it is possible on the Internet, said Ebook stores have taken that right without asking if we like it.
It literally enrages me when I think about it, all the things that are taken for granted on the Internet that, if they were applied to the real world, would certainly result in major confrontations between people and corporations. As long as corporations remain the major lobbying force, I doubt that anything will change.
I would have hoped that you had looked into this during the trials to see if the stuff worked properly, but obviously that was not something that was tested.
After all, why test that IMs get to the intended recipient in a chat session ? That's just a waste of time, innit ? Especially on a Friday evening, which has to be when this service was put into production.
Yes, production. Sorry, but when you roll out something to all and sundry you can call it beta all you want, it's in production.
Might want to think about that next time.
That they do, what people are saying here is that they should not have a say on HOW it is used.
There are enough examples of what happens to a company when accountants take over that this should not even be a worthy discussion any more.
And I think that that is something I can actually approve - at the condition that the big time crims get caught.
I mean, it is obvious that big money needs to be checked, and if they are only tracking less than 200 million records, well, that is a drop in the ocean as far as financial records is concerned.
That seems to me to to be on par with proper, warranted surveillance of suspects, and that is not something I have an issue with.
But . . I still don't trust them, nor would I be surprised to learn that a zero or three were dropped from that figure.
Yeah, because uni computer equipment is always top notch and never, ever has anything dodgy installed on it.
Uh-huh.
I have been a Firefox user for a long, long while. I abandoned IE for Netscape back in the day. Since that time, I stayed away from IE as much as possible, and was quite happy to have done so the day I found out that IE would accept forced downloads without a pip, whereas Firefox popped a warning panel with possibility to refuse (I'm sure that issue has been fixed since). What keeps me on Firefox is simply NoScript - the most browser- and privacy-securing extension that can possibly exist.
That said, my Firefox (which is not up to the last version) has a curious habit. When I'm working on the PC, I have no trouble, but if I leave it on in the evening to go watch a film or some other hour-long activity, sometimes I come back and, now and then, the PC is hung. A Win 7/64 PC.
I'm pretty sure that Firefox is the culprit, because when I leave the PC on for an all-nighter, I always shut down everything that is not essential to what I'm doing, and there never is any issue there - the PC is always on in the morning.
So there is some niggle with FF on my PC, not a biggie. Maybe the next version will fix it, maybe it won't, but I'm not leaving FF until you pry NoScript from my cold, dead hands.
I'm quite sure it is just as possible to royally fuck up an Open Source solution as it is to bugger a Closed Source one.
Open Source is not the issue, the issue is in proper specifications, proper oversight and proper responsability. Apperently, there was none of that in this project - or any other for that matter.
Open Source is not a magic wand that solves all IT woes.
Having problems with our sarcasm detector, are we ?
Reminder : a journalist was recently stopped at the UK border and detained under anti-terrorism laws in order to search him for data on his conversations with a whistleblower. I don't see that either of those two people could be classed as terrorists either, so the remark is totally in order.
As much as I appreciate Paint.NET, anyone with an ounce of sense has to admit that it simply cannot compare with Photoshop in any version.
Well, anyone who has actually worked with Photoshop, that is.
And that is why Adobe can corral people into this. There is simply nothing else on the market at that level.
Thankfully, I am not forced to use Adobe products, because I am not in that line of business. And right now, I am mighty glad about that.
Much less impressed by the fact that there are administrators in India. Actually, I can't believe that a company certified to handle backup data for government organizations and high-level private companies has half of its tape management service halfway across the world, in the hands of people it hardly knows.
I believe that building a nuclear bomb is at least as difficult as building a space plane. I read somewhere that, even if you have the plans, you can still fail your design if you don't have someone with experience in the project. Blowing up a charge of plutonium is easy, making a proper nuclear blast is one of the highest-level techs there is aside from rocket science.
And that's a good thing too, otherwise there would be much too many madmen with a twitchy finger on a launch button.
Animals with faster reaction times than us lumbering humans are rather common. Felines, from the lowly cat to the majestic lion, have reactions that are seven times faster than ours.
You know about the laser trick for cats ? Shine a laser point on the ground and watch it go nuts trying to follow it (best results with young cats - older ones get bored quick). While you laugh, notice how the cat easily follows every jitter of the point with its head, even if it can't quite follow the movement of your hand as fast as you can wiggle it.
Yeah, you might have guessed that I love cats.
There is something else nobody has mentioned yet : obligations.
Children have none. Having nothing to do, they have all the time in the world (well, in the day) to think of something to do and act on it.
Adults have things to do. Be it work, repairs, shopping or whatever, a vast majority of our day is spent dealing with stuff even if we'd rather be doing something else. All that occupation certainly counts for some of that "time flies by" feeling we have, because we can measure our day by the stuff we did (or failed to finish).
That said, I do agree children always run to get places. Always.
Just back up your Steam folder to another disk, reinstall your PC on the new disk and copy the folder back again. Log in, give your password and presto, your entire library is again available and useful.
Disk drives do not stop Steam from working. Changing motherboards do not stop Steam from working. Even upgrading the OS is generally not an issue for Steam. Just run the exe, log in and your files are there, ready to work.
I have changed HDDs, motherboards, video cards, reinstalled XP, installed Win 7 (32-bits) and so on and so forth, and every time I just launch Steam, log in and it works. The one time I had to reinstall my games (not Steam itself, just the games), was when I upgraded from Win 7/32 to Win 7/64.
If you stay on the same OS, you do not need to consider Steam as a liability. It is rather unique in that way.
Every time I hear of a new product that eliminates all issues I automatically think "snake oil".
The only way for a product to "seamlessly" manage anything is for said product to be very stringent on what it can manage - which means very little leeway for exceptions and heterogenous environments.
Either that, or it is a nightmare to configure before getting it to work, and when it does work, it does so in fits and spurts, with unexplainable holdups which cannot be resolved in a satisfactory manner.
I have to agree with that statement, but experience dictates that company data is confidential and more than important to the company.
All this cloud hoopla cannot convince me that companies are going to converge en masse and send their customer contact list, contract details and contract prices to some 3rd party that is under NSA scrutiny. Not to mention their production procedures and industrial secrets.
We've already heard that NSA used its powers to scuttle a private commercial agreement. It pains me to think that there are CEOs that are actually going to disregard that little piece of news and go ahead and put all their essential company details in a cloud anyway.
Oh well, it will become a good cautionary tale when said companies fold because their confidential data was splashed all over the web.
So true. I remember my first LAN experience was at uni in 1994. It was the first time in my life that I saw networked PCs. DOOM was the game of the day, and we booted the machines with specially-crafted floppies in the lab rooms after hours. It was all rather hush-hush, of course, but hey, that was part of the fun !
"spent a good many years on board Polaris submarines"
So you say.
I'd ask for proof, but that would still not justify your words.
BTW, those "ordinary civilians" are the very ones you were supposed to be defending. Someone who is supposedly in your position should have a bit more respect for the citizens of their country, and a bit more understanding for notion of accountability.
Unless, of course, you were only doing it for the money. Which would explain your "don't concern you" attitude.
And you'd be WRONG. They, just like any other normal FB customer, are much more interested in sharing details of their lives on a day-to-day basis. Such as, which new parasite they picked up this morning on their daily 5km walk to get water (and a wifi connection), who they saw get shot on the way, and btw, has anyone caught anything yesterday, or do we have to eat more kava bread again ?
Not common enough, apparently.
Paypal is benefitting from the fact that it proposes a service that is quite indeed useful to do things and behave in a way a proper bank never could.
I wonder when people will wise up to the fact that freezing an account is NOT something that should be allowed or tolerated, whatever the reason. A real bank never does that without a court order - it doesn't have the right to. If Paypal has a legitimate suspicion concerning the activity taking place on an account, it should go to the police; not freeze the account and then pretend that it is just trying to do what's best.
But, like Facebook, I suppose people will never understand that Paypal is NOT their pal - until it's their account that is frozen, that is.
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