Posts by Pascal Monett

Internet giant you may still remember (AOL) gobbles vid ad biz Adap.tv

I didn't know they still had money to burn.

And I'm not sure AOL has what it takes to compete against YouTube.

Another failure in the making, I guess. But this will cost them.

Seagate's shingle bathers stalked by HGST's helium HAMR-head sharks

Sounds a bit too complicated for me

So, write head larger than read head, overwrite by reading adjacent area and writing both, domino effect for the width of the band . . .

ouch.

If they can actually get this tech to work with the same data bandwidth and response times that we enjoy on today's disks, in read and write modes, then I will be suitably impressed.

But it is still starting to look like there's a whole barrel of monkeys behind every disk write, and when you introduce more complexity you unavoidably introduce more points of failure.

I won't be totally stupid and say something like "they should reduce the size of the write head" - if they could they most probably would have. But still, it doesn't look too good from the MTBF point of view.

Wait and see, I guess. But I'll be approaching those drives warily.

Facebook turns tables on profile stalkers with News Feed tweak

But Zuck doesn't care about you. He cares about his advertisers.

THEY are his clients.

YOU are his bitch product.

The terrifying tech behind this summer's zombie assault

"3D films are increasingly becoming the standard"

No, they're not. That is a fad that is already starting to fade because

1) people are annoyed by the surcharge

2) people get headaches

3) people are wisening up to the fact that today's 3D is just glitter, bringing nothing to the plot

Historically speaking, we first had black & white films without sound. They were perfectly capable of telling a story. We added sound to the black and white films, and were capable of telling better stories. We then added color to the films, and the stories we told became more natural.

At no point did anyone point at the screen and laugh and say "it's all 2D !". Nobody cared. Immersion was sufficient.

Now the media industry is desperately trying to add 3D and make people believe that it is important, indeed, revolutionary. Except 3D does nothing to improve the telling of a story. On the contrary, it clashes with immersion, and most often jarringly brings home the fact that you are watching a film.

There may be a time coming when some genius filmmaker will find a way to make 3D relevant to the story - miracles can happen. At this point in time, all 3D is used for is the same trick as the very first black & white film that showed people a train coming head-on - and people fled from the theater.

That trick is old now, and people are getting tired of it already. I cannot count the times I've already heard friends and acquaintances talking about the latest film they saw in 3D and mentioning that the 3D was annoying more than anything else. I've had some friends state that they will no longer go to a 3D viewing at all. I know I won't.

So no, 3D is NOT on its way to becoming a standard.

Not by a long shot.

Flippin' tosser: Sun's magnetic field poised to SWIVEL on it - NASA

For those in need of their daily dose of anxiety :

OH MY GOD RUN ! THE SUN'S GONNA FLIP ! IT'LL BE THE END OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM AND LIFE AS WE KNOW IT !

This was an announcement from the Daily Mail Dept of Science. You're welcome.

Horrific moment curvy mum-of-none Mail Online spills everyone's data

Absolutely !

I don't read either publications - I'm French !

Report: NSA spying deals billion dollar knockout to US cloud prospects

Re: does that mean I am now on a target list as an anti- American

Apparently, if you're not an American, the NSA has already put you on that list.

Re: good luck with an invasion

Why invade at all ?

You're doing a brilliant job of fucking up your country on your own.

Apple patents laser, incandescent projector for laptops, smartphones

Solution looking for a problem - again

I don't see why this could be useful in any way. We already have small projectors that are quite bright enough, not too expensive, and easy to connect to laptops and, probably, tablets.

Given that the market is not in terrible need of image projecting technology, I don't see that this will change the market in any particular way.

Image capture was a totally different ball game. Having a camera in every phone has indeed been a good thing, if only to prove that UFOs and Bigfoot do not actually exist. But image projection ? Somehow I don't see that work that well.

After all, if you're projecting an image, you generally want to show your friends - who, these days, are on Facebook, so not there, so no use projecting.

US feds: 'Let's make streaming copyrighted content a FELONY'

Re: unlimited bandwidth and capless download plans

They can also be used to honestly download Windows patches, hotfixes for games legally acquired, and Linux distributions.

Why the fuck does every anti-piracy maniac have to reduce the Internet to only piracy ?

Don't you know that it is PORN that makes the world go round ?

Super-SVELTE BLUSH-PINK planet goes too far with star

I think that, nowadays, our notion of orbital physics in our own solar system is pretty accurate. If there was a Jupiter-sized mass outside of the orbit of Neptune, it would most likely mess up the calculations for Neptune and Uranus, and even more for Pluto and Charon, and those anomalies would have been detected for what they are by the scientific community.

Therefor, I think that we can safely say that, if there is a planet of jovian-level mass outside the heliosphere of our system, it is so far away as to be nearly undetectable. That could mean that, if present, it might not even be orbiting our Sun.

But I don't think there is.

Don't forget that Jupiter is the king of all planets, none are bigger. Jupiter is 317 times the mass of our Earth, that is VERY massive. If there was another Jupiter lying around, we'd have detected it.

Probably because not everyone knows what "au" means.

In addition, it is often good to give a comparison, so even if the people who don't know what "au" means will most likely have no idea of how far our Earth is from the Sun in the first place, they will still come out with the impression that they learned something.

They don't recognise us as HUMAN: Disability groups want CAPTCHAs killed

Re: "it should be quite easy to detect when the system is being abused"

I'd think that if it were quite easy to detect when the system is being abused, then we wouldn't need captchas in the first place.

Chinese Apple suppliers face toxic heavy metal water pollution charges

Indeed, lay off Apple here

The problem is not Apple, it is Foxconn. And Foxconn makes stuff for other companies than Apple.

I have nothing against slagging Apple, but this is a Foxconn problem, not an Apple one.

And yes, I would also like to know what other companies are Foxconn customers.

Paid-for stuff likely to triumph over free – shock report

I'm sorry, but could you please point me to an online music market that has removed DRM ?

I wasn't aware that there were any.

Any legal ones, that is.

Bad timing: New HTML5 trickery lets hackers silently spy on browsers

Re: This is 2013

Yes, and I should now have the power to decide what runs on my machine and what doesn't.

I should be able to block JavaScript until I decide that I wish it to run. Telling me that there are more and more sites that use it is not an excuse. It should still be in my power to decide.

There are sites that are entirely made of Flash animations - I can still decide whether or not I want to see them. If I don't, I am aware that I will not access any site content. My choice.

It's about choice.

Earn £8,000 a MONTH with bogus apps from Russian malware factories

All that intelligence, all that effort

And all that for illegal easy money.

Ah, the dark side is indeed powerful.

I wonder what all those minds could accomplish if they attempted to tackle a problem that could actually be useful to society ?

But enough daydreaming, that'll never happen.

Microsoft loosens strings on Office 365, drops kimono on upgrade options

I can't help but think

that this is the true beginning of the end of Microsoft Office.

Twenty years from now, we just might be looking at MS Office the same way we look at WordPerfect today.

And everyone will use LibreOffice, because Microsoft will have thoroughly disgusted users from its own product with its abusive license techniques.

Oh sure, there will be the Fortune 1000 companies that will do everything with MS products as they always have done. But everyone else will just use the tools that they need and not purchase a gigantic toolbox they don't need.

Of course, I am probably wrong, but I'm convinced MS is not making its life easier with this scheme. You can't beat free for price, and if its good enough for your needs, it will do. LibreOffice is good enough for personal use, and more and more people are starting to realize it. If MS loses the individual demographic, the professional one will follow sooner or later. MS knows that, they did it in reverse (and still do, with their ultra-low-price student licences).

There's a tide of unstructured data coming - start swimming

What a load of bollocks

As said above, it is hardly surprising that a datamining CEO would trumpet the utter indispensability of his company's tools. Fine, it's a good PR piece.

But let's look at the reality of things, hmm ?

"Unstructured data must also be thought of in its textual form of Word documents, emails, social media messages and other as yet undefined data shapes." - sorry, social media has a noise to data ratio that is far too important to make any sort of data mining useless. Yes, you will probably find tweets that say your company is good, and others saying the reverse. You will never be able to map that to a customer having bought something from you unless said customer specifically signs up on your site to tell you that his Twitter account is FancyPants35748 and his credit card name is Jonathan Smith. Sure, some twits will tell you, but most will probably be a bit reluctant to acknowledge that their online persona is GorgeousJunk69.

Just a few paragraphs later, the article quotes "The fact is that context will always rank as ace high".

So let's just write off social media now. You'll never get the context in a 160-char tweet.

Next point : “Those who are still relying on human interpretation will be trying to stay afloat on the unstructured data tsunami with one hand tied behind their back,” dixit Andrew Anderson, CEO of Celaton. What is he saying ? Humans cannot be trusted to manage data in a timely fashion and we must hand over our analysis procedures to computers.

Yeah, sure. Because we know how to teach computers to distinguish between "programmer" and "Oracle developer" and "business analyst". Yeah, let's hand it over to computers, that'll work a lot better. Just like it works fine in Australia, for processing payments. Tell me, if we can still find major companies capable of botching up a comparatively simple job of paying salaries, how can we expect to be able to get relevant information from a tsunami of unstructured data ?

“Having a system in place that can understand a candidate’s CV without the need for human intervention is crucial." Indeed. Too bad we don't have a reliable system that can do that automatically without human intervention.

"correlating point-of-sale transactions with social feeds can provide great insight into how a consumer felt about the company and the product" - yes, except you don't know that that is indeed a consumer of your product, and not some hacker or troll pulling your data leg.

"This estimates that the digital universe of western Europe will grow from 538 exabytes to 5.0 zettabytes between 2012 and 2020" - yup, and 99% of that will be of absolutely no interest to anyone after a week.

"We know that a huge amount of unstructured data is spam" - finally something I can agree with. And you want me to waste my time and money building a system that is going to analyse my spam mail to tell me I'm getting spam ? Get lost.

The reality of data analysis is sort your data first. The bigger the volume of data, the more stringent your data retention criteria must be. The only data worth analysing is the data relevant to your company, the rest is a waste of resources. This article tries to make me believe that I must become the NSA and gather as much data as I can to hoard it and endlessly analyse it. I say bullshit. Recovering every tweet where my company is named is not going to actually give me a proper image of my company. Looking at my sales figures will.

IBM committed 'ethical transgressions' to win botched project

".. to the detriment of ...", my good sir. One does something to the detriment of something else or someone.

Hundreds of UK CSC staff face chop, told to train Indian replacements

@Rob Fisher

You sound like you have a job in management. Maybe at CSC.

Let me ask you one question : if you needed a heart transplant, what would you rather hear ;

"Don't worry sir, we have the most experienced surgeon in the country waiting for you, he's done six thousand operations just like yours, you'll be fine. Of course, your insurance is going to pay a hefty sum, but good health is priceless, is it not ?"

or

"Don't worry about your insurance premiums sir, we have a new surgeon fresh in from Tzeckoslowhateveria. He used to be a programmer but he passed an online certification and now he's itching to get some experience for only £1/hour. Of course, we'll need you to sign this waiver..."

Well CSC is going for option #2, do you know why ? Because the people who make the decision will be up & out as soon as they've cashed their bonus checks and won't have to deal with the fallout.

Now you tell me just how that is rational.

Or rather, don't bother. You are part of those who believe that money is the only criteria, so obviously you cannot understand just how wrong you are. Until the day comes when YOU are made redundant, of course. That day it'll be a whole other story, I'm sure.

Google scientists rebel over company's support for 'climate-hoax' Senator

Re:"Let's just say that global warming is a fact"

Let's say it's not.

Climate change, on the other hand, is.

Whether it is warming or cooling is something that we simply do not have either the experience or the knowledge to determine at this point in time.

It is the refusal of that last fact that gives room for lunatics on either side of the fence to rock the boat, so to speak.

Re: "you're not a real scientist"

For fuck's sake, a real scientist is sceptical of ANYTHING that is not proven.

That is a job requirement.

Oh, and proven in a Twitter feed or a fucking blog is NOT scientific proof.

'Mm, we do love tweeters' private info, we'll take 40% more,' say world's g-men

Secret courts, secret mandates, secret demands

Are soon followed by secret kidnappings and secret executions.

Any country using those methods has lost the right to declare itself a bastion of freedom and a place of democracy.

Highway from HELL: Volcano tears through 35km of crust in WEEKS

A high-speed connection ?

The Earth has already upgraded to USB 3.1 ? Cool !

Murdoch machinations mean Microsoft must rename SkyDrive

I have it : EasyDrive !

That way we can have Round 2 of lawyer spats when EasyJet, who thinks it owns the word "easy", comes a'knocking.

Come on, I like popcorn.

New NSA tool exposed: XKeyscore sees 'nearly EVERYTHING you do online'

I think it's due to the education.

Or lack thereof.

And I'm not talking about schools.

Re: "its about time inept Congress and SCOTUS grow a pair and do their damn jobs"

But they ARE doing their jobs. Make no mistake, your Senator is well aware of this program and has no intent of stopping it.

Oh, sorry, you thought they were there to represent YOUR rights ? That is soo last century.

Get with the program ! This is Government 2.0 ! The Constitution is a PR tool to make you feel good, it's not something that is supposed to hamstring WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE.

Now be a good drone and go work for your retirement. Oh, and this time, tie your shoelaces correctly. Your laces were really shabby yesterday, you want the surveillance footage to prove it ? I could show it to you, but then I'd have to shoot you.

You're 30 years old and your PIN is '1983'. DAMMIT, biz mobe user

All be it does not exist

The word you're looking for is albeit.

Please upgrade your personal dictionary accordingly.

Wall St 'Likes' Facebook again: Shares edge up to pre-IPOcalypse price

It's not the tech stock

It's you misusing the stock market. The stock market is supposed to allow people to INVEST in companies, not speculate on them.

INVESTMENT : long-term placement showing belief and support of a company in hope of increased returns over the years

SPECULATION : fucking bastardisation of the system in hope of short-term benefit, economy and consequences be damned

Scalpers gouge China's fanbois for Genius Bar appointments

Well that's it for Communism then

One thing you have to admit, the Chinese are just about as capitalistic as it is possible to be. There is apparently nothing they will not latch on to and transform for profit, whatever the domain, and consequences be damned.

I'd keep that in mind the next time you hear somebody complaining about how the Government is preventing free enterprise.

China's army releases FPS trainer game

Glorius Mission, eh ?

Isn't that the one where Chinese pirates had got their hands on a beta copy and were selling it for an impressive amount of money ? A game that is supposed to be free ?

Ah, I love the smell of irony in the morning.

First burger made of TEST-TUBE MEAT to be eaten on August 5

Don't worry, there are insect farms springing up left and right, and pundits punditing away that insect meat is the new Gold Rush opportunity.

McGrasshoppers ? We'll get there.

Russia's post-Snowden spooks have not reverted to type

Re: "record the sound of a typewriter and analyse it afterwards"

If there is any other ambient noise in the room (radio, phones ringing, people talking, other typewriters) then it will most probably make that process extremely difficult.

Not to say that the process would be easy under the best of circumstances.

Listening in to an electronic keyboard and analyzing the voltage differences, yeah, that I can buy. Listening to an audio recording of a busy office to single out a specific typewriter ? Not convincing at all.

Microsoft to Google: Please remove us from internet

Torch and pitchforks

Patience, my pretties. Your time is coming.

Bank of Thailand bans Bitcoin

Drug dealers ?

I seriously doubt that drug dealers waste their time with a few Bitcoins. There aren't enough of those virtual coins and drugs are a multi-billion-dollar business.

Of course, not being a drug dealer, I may be wrong.

Robot cop called in after MAD BONGER blown up in LIQUID MARIJUANA EXPLOSION

What a shame

A failed Darwin award, that is.

Dumpsters begone! App matches diners with leftovers to broke, hungry

"their concern is environmental"

Yeah, a bunch of people cruising around in their cars to go leftover-hopping is going to be real environmental.

And I don't think the poor are going to benefit all that much from this thing either, because they are generally surrounded by other poor people, not people sufficiently well off to have a full fridge and not enough appetite to finish their meal.

I cannot fault the idea in itself, but in truth I find it the perfect demonstration of pie-in-sky, hippy thinking. It's a rather sad thing that our society has to resort to encouraging poor people to eat other people's leftovers, rather than finding ways of making them not poor any more.

On top of that, I'm pretty sure that there will be people who will spit in their leftovers just out of spite.

Symantec slams Web Gateway back door on would-be corporate spies

What a list

"SEC Consult identified six vulnerabilities with the technology in total, including: cross-site scripting; OS command injection; security misconfiguration; SQL Injection; and cross-site request forgery flaws"

If I'm not mistaken, OS command injection and SQL injection are simply due to the absence of input sanitization. If that is indeed the case, then BOOOOO !

NASA gets red-hot shots of Sun in action as IRIS goes online

Re: "The latest analysis of a possible Carrington level event ..."

Thank you for an interesting post.

I think I would need a checklist of things to do to prepare for a major EMP event. Looks like unplugging absolutely everything would be a Step 1. But would that be enough ?

I have all my household electronics on lightning mitigators, but that is visibly not enough for that kind of event. Thanks for the heads-up ! Now I'm off to scour the 'Net and find out what really needs to be done.

Assange™ names a Senatorial stand-in

"ethicist and commentator"

Ah, so now we have a new title for people with no actual skills who find themselves in the limelight.

No doubt this lady will have a brilliant career doing nothing useful whatsoever beyond blabbering on talk shows.

Man who pulled gun during chess game surrenders to robot cop

Not very impressed

If all that was done in the end was chuck in a few flashbangs then I have a hard time imagining why a robot was needed.

But I guess the SWAT teams were otherwise occupied, what with all the horrible, horrible filesharing going on.

One month on, Edward Snowden cleared to leave Moscow airport

Funny how there is this obsession with one guy at a certain address.

If you want to go arrest those responsible for the current state of the USA, you would do better to go to

U.S. House of Representatives

Washington, DC 20515

[phone]

round up the scum that voted for all this secret court nonsense and total world surveillance plans and have them shot behind the shed.

Funny, I hear a helicopter - never been this close before. What's that banging at my door ? Hey ! <connection failed>

Boffins DREAMING of a WHITE CHRISTMAS ... on MARS!

Re: "> The surface of the planet is young"

Yeah, probably thinks Mars is "only" 2,500 years old.

Village-swallowing MUDCANO was no accident, say boffins

Finally !

But You Shall Not Pass is way after. You should have stayed with "You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum".

MYSTERY of 19th-century DEAD WALRUS found in London graveyard

Wait, what ?

"... some Lovecraftian tale of a horrific walrusoid abomination - created perhaps in the lab of some insane experimenter, only to break free and terrorise the foggy streets of old London town in a bloody campaign of tusky or red-flippered slaughter, then later to be buried along with its victims' remains ..."

I want to see that film !!!

Senator: Surveillance state based on secret law 'has no place in America'

Finally one of them has the balls to stand up and disagree

I don't know this senator's political history is and I don't care. This is the true America, the one with the strength to acknowledge its mistakes and correct them.

It will take time, it won't be easy, but the road has now changed. Snowden was the first step, Wyden is now the second. The ball is rolling and we can hope that true Freedom will once again be had by all.

Plus, we can now finally lay to rest that argument about whether or not Snowden was a traitor. He was not.

Divers nearly DEVOURED by HUNGRY SEA BEASTS

Whale finds humans in his food, leaves disgusted

In other news, Johnny Blubber was disagreeably surprised to find a pair of humans polluting his sardine sammy this morning.

"There were just floating there, right in the middle of my plate" Johnny declared after the incident. "It's like they were doing it on purpose."

As we all know, humans ruin the taste of sardines with their rubbery smell. Johnny tried to eat anyway, but the stench was just too much.

"I couldn't take it, I had to leave." Johnny said, disgusted. "What a waste." he added.

Yahoooo! - Activist! investor! leaps! overboard! jingling! with! cash!

Doubled since last spring, eh ?

Let's see what the numbers say.

Last Spring was around March, if I'm not mistaken, but it's obvious that February is the reference. February value was 19.77.

Double that is 39.54.

Current price as of July 1st was 25.26, so there is 14.28 missing, which makes more than a third (36%) less than what he states.

For his claim to be valid, you have to go back to September 2012, and I don't remember Spring ever happening in September, even with the crazy weather we're having these days.

Conclusion : the numbers say his claim is bullshit.

Secondary conclusion : he's probably so full of it that he actually believes the bull he spouts.

SanDisk starts beating path to 3D NAND flash

This is true 3D computing

Kudos to the development team, who have managed to implement "real" 3D in design, not just by stacking chips. Kudos also to the management who did not squash the idea to go do like everybody else.

I hope this tech will prove itself indeed better than stacking chips, which somehow feels like cheating. If it does, I wonder what the financial impact will be on the cost of foundries. They already cost a few billion to build - if this tech really takes off will that change significantly ?