Posts by Pascal Monett

Facebook swallows Oculus VR goggle-geeks. Did that really happen?

Re: You JUST DONT KNOW

Yes we do. We have largely enough data on Facebook history to know exactly where this is going.

If it gets to store shelves, you won't need to sign in to Facebook, you'll be plugged in automatically. You will, of course, have a sign in option for those who are stupid enough to think that it is a good idea to tell The Zuck and his minions that this new online thingy belongs to someone who you already know everything about, but I'm sure Zuck's minions will find a way to correlate their records without your help.

Oh, I'm sorry, you didn't realize that the Foculous is going to phone home ? Oh but it will, because it's Facebook and Facebook means ads and personal information harvesting. And that means that El Zuck will watch what you're watching while he's watching you, to "better" serve you ads.

And you can bet the Foculous will be dirt cheap - gotta get them ad views in somehow.

El Zuck must be sporting a heavy one right now, bitch.

I feel so sorry for Carmack. What a way to end one's career.

Improbable: YOU gave model Lily Cole £200k for her Impossible.com whimsy-site

Absolutely right !

And I'll go a step further and say that if MY taxes are funding you, you have the choice of either justifying every cent you take or refusing to take anything.

Personally, I would have sent a police car with orders to get either the information, or the people responsible into custody.

But then some people would go calling names and invoking Goodwin for some reason.

Apple says sayonara to Samsung's ninjas: iPad, iPhone don't infringe comms patents – report

Got yer Snickers nicked by some colored kid in playground, did ya ?

Or are you just trolling ?

Yeah, must be trolling.

No, you're still right. The lawyers aren't on either side.

Nonsense !

Jaguar is NOT a famous German luxury car manufacturer, it is a famous Indian luxury car manufacturer.

ISPs' pirate-choking blocking measures ARE effective – music body

So, the "music" industry wants to go after Google now ?

I wish them good luck there. I really do.

And I'm going to buy a truckload of popcorn to watch the proceedings. It's not every day you get to see a cage fight between a white-collar junkie and a gorilla on steroids. The IFPI won't even know what hit it.

GSMA: EU net neutrality reforms are the enemy of business

ISP Reality Check

An ISP offers Internet access. Businesses, like consumers, pay for getting connected. Once they are connected, what transits on the lines have NOTHING TO DO WITH ISPs any more.

And it's not because we're talking about mobile that that changes anything. The only thing an ISP has the right to do is count the bits and charge according to contract.

Throttling, or interfering in any way over the kind of data, is simply not in the contract and should never be.

5 Eyes in the Sky: The TRUTH about Flight MH370 and SPOOKSATS

Just FYI, SOSUS is apparently only for the Northern Hemisphere.

'It is disappointing that the government secretly did this stuff'

@Titus Technophobe

The bit I don't understand is why folks feel the Internet is any different from the 'real world'

That's probably because in the Internet you don't feel the surveillance, it happens in the ether and you have no way of even knowing you are being watched.

If the Internet was not there to allow them to do the job invisibly, there would have to be a Security Officer in every Post Office, reading your mail (in back rooms, or maybe not). Another one would be at every intersection recording all cars that went by (maybe stopping them to do so without missing any). You wouldn't place calls directly, you'd have to first call Homeland Security and ask them to connect you to someone (while they record the call).

In every shop you'd have to present your ID to an officer so he could record your purchases and cross-reference them to your name. Every place you could buy something you would give an officer your card so he could make the transaction for you in a Homeland Security-approved manner (with your ID tagged to the purchase).

Etc.

I think people would rather object to that, generally speaking. But since it is happening on the Internet and they don't see it happening, it sails through almost unhindered.

Haunted Empire calls Apple 'a cult built around a dead man.' Tim Cook calls it 'nonsense'

Re: the sheer unthinking inanity of what passes for comment on the subject

Welcome to the Internet !

Not yet.

I fully expect to see Jobs' face on toast shortly.

Imagination brings real-time hyper-realistic ray tracing to mobile kit

enterprise product lines ?

What company do I have to send a CV to to get paid to play ?

I do hope this tech filters . . up to a proper PC platform and I think it will - eye candy is <u>the</u> criteria for selling games these days, after all, before story, innovation or literally anything else.

And that little bugger can really do eye candy, apparently. If the hype is true, that is.

WhatsApp founder: Privacy WON'T vanish under Facebook

Pardoned ?!??

In what world ?

The NSA has most certainly not been pardoned. If it had been, the citizens would have dropped the subject and moved back to sports.

The NSA is not "pardoned", it's just that the NSA doesn't have to give a flying one whether the People like it or not.

Sorry Dick: 3 reasons why Twitter will NEVER be unblocked in China

a lot of data ?

You mean ALL the data, don't you ?

WTF is … the multiverse?

Not "outside" our Universe

The idea of the multiverse - as far as I understand it - is that there are an infinite number of parallel dimensions in which variations of this universe exist.

In some, Man never came to be because something kept that from happening. In other, closer variations, nuclear war happened after WWII. The possible infinites are unimaginable.

I do not see that this theory contradicts the "all possible quantum statistical outcomes of an event actually exist together". It all depends on your definition of "together".

Obvious answer

Someone, somewhere, would try to recreate the initial conditions to validate the theory !

Google hit by Monday morning blues: Talk, Hangouts, Sheets crash

Re: What is this cloud thing they keep talking about?

It's that thing that is managed by people who don't know you nor care much about you or your needs, but will take your money and promise 24/7 service.

Then they turn around and stop things you need because they scheduled a major upgrade during a work week, which, as any private-company-employed sysadmin knows, is something you do over the weekend so as to not disrupt business.

But they got their business when you gave them your money. Your business ? No worry, Sir, we'll be back online soon. When ? <click>

Win XP holdouts storm eBay and licence brokers, hiss: Give us all your Windows 7

Never ease up on pressuring Microsoft

There will never be enough people on the Bandwagon, given that we're dealing with a company that has a history of doing what it wants and not noticing user backlash.

Nobody can "make this O/S useable". It isn't. It was designed not to be.

We don't like it and we won't use it, thank you. We didn't need your permission anyway.

Oh, and I have a new car for you. Here, take a seat. There you are. What's that ? No steering wheel ? No, I've removed it. No clutch either. At least, not visible. The brakes and accelerator are hidden as well. Look how streamlined your car interior is !

How do you get somewhere ? Well I'll just let you discover that on your own. Have fun !

@Steve : Microsoft system requirements, really ?

You justify your argument by using Microsoft-supplied system requirements ?

Please. Everybody knows that Microsoft system requirements are the minimum resources needed to BOOT a PC, not USE it.

4GB and oodles of disk space (preferably more than one disk) are needed to USE Windows (whatever version). Having only 1GB on Win 8 is going to impose vast amounts of swapping time and generally crappy PC responsiveness.

I use Win7/64 with 16GB of RAM, an 8-core CPU and almost 5TB across 7 discs. It runs fine. Use a PC with 1GB of RAM ? I'd rather go watch a film on TV - the framerate will be smoother.

Oh Microsoft is still that stupid, don't worry.

The thing is, even a complete moron can spot a train barrelling down on him while he's tied to the tracks, and when he does, he will start wriggling and squirming and attempting to break free.

Microsoft is tied to the PC world track, and the browser train is due to pass any time now. I call it the browser train because every pad, tablet, phone and whatnot that people are using today to do what they did - and more of what they didn't - on PCs, every thingamabob people are sticking their fingers on now has an HTML-type interface to the various walled gardens Apple and the rest are trying to herd them in to.

PCs are going to back to a minority position for the simple reason that they got foisted onto everybody only because there was no other choice. There is choice now, and people are choosing, and they are not choosing PCs because those bloody things are complicated to understand and maintain. A tablet, on the other hand, is simplicity itself - or so the marketing department would like us to think.

So the threat is looming, casting a shadow over Microsoft headquarters, and there is panic in the upper spheres. And Microsoft does what it always has done : create a new One OS for everything, this time touch-enabled because the future is very much to do with touchscreens, whether or not said screens are attached to a PC.

The Start button, not-Metro issue is Microsoft squirming and wriggling and not getting out of its situation. It's not getting out of its situation because there is a mindlock at the MS board : it's Windows or nothing.

No problem guys, it'll be nothing then. When consumers will have entirely moved to the next generation of whatever we'll call a computer at that time, Windows will be a dead dodo for the public, good only for programming, heavy-duty data management and business applications.

I'll be curious to see how MS manages its situation in the coming years, when a generation that has not grown up on Windows starts entering the job market. I think that is when MS is going to start seeing a growing dent in its money tower. Because until then, MS has more money than it needs to weather the situation - well, unless it goes on gobbling useless startups at billions in costs which, in its current state of near-desperation, it is entirely capable of doing.

Re: "Many regard [..] Windows 7 as a small downgrade"

Not to dispute what many regard, but Windows 7 is not a downgrade at all (unless many confuse Office 2010 and the Ribbon with Win7 - entirely possible, I agree).

Windows 7 is much more stable than XP, doesn't freeze annoyingly when you accidentally click on an empty optical unit (although that issue is still not perfectly dealt with) and generally is much better at keeping one programs' issues away from the rest of the system.

Additionally, the 64-bit environment works much better than I thought it would. I can use all of my application library without trouble, almost all of my games, and with 16GB of RAM, I practically never run out of memory anymore.

So Win7, especially the 64-bit version, is a great improvement over XP - now that all my hardware has the proper drivers, of course.

That said, I would never install Win7 on a PC specced for XP. I'd rather get Ubuntu on that.

Straight to 8: London's Met Police hatches Win XP escape plan

Re: Unbelievable lack of stregic planning

Coincidentally, I'm once again watching my Yes Minister collection.

Having read this article, in light of my current experience, I believe that when the circumstances are right, in the fullness of time, you will no doubt be enlightened to learn that the plans concerning this migration are extensive and have been and are still amply discussed at every level.

There is absolutely no lack of planning. On the contrary, every minute detail is being planned and the plan is being revised as we speak. I'm quite sure that the Division of Departmental Planning will have its report ready on time as forecast, in 2016.

Romanian 'ransomware victim' hangs self and 4-year-old son – report

If people are starting to die from it . . .

. . . then maybe we're going to start to see some true international cooperation from police forces concerning this disgusting problem.

When it was "just" a question of money, international borders were amply sufficient to keep criminals in one country from legal trouble in another (anonymity and all that). Now that it is becoming a question of lives, I doubt that our esteemed legislators are going to be able to waffle about the issue any more.

And since we're already under active surveillance by just about every government that has Internet access, don't come at me with lame excuses like "we can't find them". If you're abusing our right to privacy, you could at least do something useful with that power. Well, useful to us that is.

BuzzGasm: 9 Incredible Things You Never Knew About PLIERS!

11.a. But only if you're in plier distance of them

Ethical hacker backer hacked, warns of email ransack

"EC-Council uses a cloud service provider for enterprise email"

What could possibly go wrong ?

Well, this. You outsource your security to someone else = you're only as secure as they are.

Brilliant demonstration.

Battery vendors push ultracapacitor wrappers to give Li-ions more bite

"They can now allow processors to work at full power"

Oh, because right now I'm only using what, 75% power ?

This may be an interesting idea, I don't know, but that sentence has some powerful cognitive dissonance. An ultracapacitor will allow burst mode functionality for sure, but only for as long as it holds energy to do so. And I don't suppose we're talking megawatts, here.

Once said capacitor is empty, the processor (and the rest of the power-hungry elements of which there are a few more than just that one) will have to rely on plain old socket power, or power from the rest of the battery.

And the ultracapacitor will not recharge itself faster than current can get to it, no matter what magical graphene/unicorn horn you put in it.

Enterprise adolescent: Salesforce.com's struggles at 15

Does this remind anyone of anything ?

The words "dog food", "eating" and "your own" come to mind.

Or does this mean that Salesforce is useless in financial reporting ?

Not using it, so don't know, but this article seems to indicate that if Salesforce is indeed using its own products, it doesn't help.

Web inventor Berners-Lee: I so did NOT see this cat vid thing coming

And how exactly is the Web not optimized for cat pics ?

When I look at my tabby, I get to thinking it's the entire world that is optimized for those bastards.

Love the purring, though.

NSA's TURBINE robot can pump 'malware into MILLIONS of PCs'

Yeah, but terrorists never were the problem.

They are just the distraction for the public.

Re: Paid for subscriptions and text documents sent out over XMPP

And that would impact packet sniffing how exactly ?

Amen to that !

As has already been said elsewhere, nobody is contesting the fact that this whole thing is legal.

The whole problem is that it is legal.

In theory, a democracy is supposed to prevent that.

This just demonstrates that nobody is actually living in a democracy today.

QuantumCopper, QuantumSky, QuantumHand . . .

Is there any chance that there's a Dr Who fan choosing the code names ?

New fear: Worm that ransacked US military PCs was blueprint for spies' super-malware

No ! Don't encourage it ! It might actually become sentient at some point, and where would we be then ?

Candy Crush King plans IPO valuing it at $7.6 BEEELLION

Who said it wasn't a real drug ?

EU Parliament rubber-stamps 'irreversible' data protection reforms

"data protection is more than ever a competitive advantage"

Bless the EU once again.

Now I only have one question : is this going to protect EU citizens from US and EU snooping, or just US snooping ?

Five unbelievable headlines that claim Tim Berners-Lee 'INVENTED the INTERNET'

Re: Protocol breakdown by traffic

What, no mention of <gasp!> porn ?

What is the world coming to ?

UK's CASH POINTS to MISS Windows XP withdrawal date

"realised the capital cost of paying for the existing ATMs"

Who the fuck are they joking with ?

Do they really think we're going to believe that those ATMs haven't already paid for themselves a hundred times over ?

An ATM is one less bank teller to employ, is open 24/7, in all weather, all year 'round, especially when the bank tellers are not available. If banks had to employ an actual person for that, it would cost them a lot more.

That investment got its return the year after its installation.

Not a valid excuse. An habitual one, to be sure, since banks are always whining about costly their operation is, but once again the bonuses of top management tell the true story : they're rolling in dough and don't know what to do with it.

They do know what they won't do with it though : use it wisely.

Boffins build bendy screen using LEDs just THREE atoms thick

Re: a surface sturdy enough to stop your toddler licking the pixels off your telly

I know that one ! It's called "glass", and there's a new model with holes in it.

Protect data by deleting it: Ground Labs

Ground Labs

Sponsored by the NSA ?

We all owe our EXISTENCE to lovely VOLCANOES, say boffins

Don't feed the troll.

Especially one this delusional.

What did you see, Elder Galaxies? What made you age so quickly?

What if ..

Those galaxies might be just 1.2 million years from spawning a whole new constellation of stars ?

Are we sure they are not ?

Honest question, I have no idea either way.

MtGox gets its sorry assets frozen amid US class-action lawsuit

Re: anymore money is just 1's and 0's on some bank's computer also

That is true, technically speaking.

And the recent washout the banks are responsible for doesn't help keep ideas straight on the matter either.

But in the end, there is one big difference : the 1s and 0s that define your bank account are managed by an institution that has two legal requirements - a) to manage your account with full accounting transparency and accountability and b) to grant you all access to your money unless a court says otherwise.

So the major difference between the bits managed by a bank and the bits (mis)managed by Gox is that you do have legal recourse against a bank and the bank is legally obliged to justify itself if it "loses" your money, whereas Gox is legally liable for not much and, not being a bank, doesn't have the same accountability requirement.

Plus there's the fact that the bits managed by your bank have a source that is way more based in reality than the ones "mined" by a graphics card.

So please do not give in to the Matrix conspiracy theorists that are foaming at the mouth around this issue. The failure of Gox has nothing to do with banks. Gox failed purely on grounds of incompetence and ignorance.

Banks, on the other hand, knew full what they were getting into, and were just playing the field until the other shoe dropped. Their only problem is that it dropped a bit too soon compared to their weekly forecasts.

Q. Can your Linux PC run Crysis? OK, it can. But will it run natively? A. Soon, very soon

Re: The one remaining unique strength Windows has, is gaming

Being a gamer, I have Windows 7/64. It works well, better than any Windows before it.

But ever since Valve announced the Steam OS, well let's just say that Microsoft's days are now officially numbered in my house.

Of the four games I play the most, CS:GO, Minecraft, Diablo III and LotRO, there are now two that have official, native Linux versions, and the other two can be installed on a Linux system with a bit of help.

When I look at my game purchasing habits, it has been years since I have bought a DVD with the crap DRM that comes with it. I no longer need plastic to play, I only buy through Steam.

Not all titles in the Steam catalogue work on Linux, and I will no doubt need a Windows partition for a few years to come. But when the Steam OS comes out, I will be installing it and trying everything out asap and I guarantee that anything not working under Steam OS will be something I am not playing with for a while.

So I agree, the Steam OS is a sign that Windows is finished, and this piece of news is strongly in support of that.

And that can only make me happy.

My work-from-home setup's better than the office. It's GLORIOUS

Re: the world is full of new-school devvies, knocking up stonking apps and interfaces for mobiles

You mean farting apps, don't you ?

Oh, and the random bird-throwing app too, I forgot.

But you're right on one thing : all will change soon - when you lot who don't know how to code are confronted with real-life situations and have to spend your nights desperately divining why your "stonking" app doesn't work in basic situations.

Then you'll learn to appreciate application execution logging and proper coding procedures.

But by then the Son of Stuxnet will have morphed into SkyNet anyway.

The only thing that is shocking is how you missed getting dragged to court over charges of wilful destruction of company property.

And yes, in my days we had to walk uphill both ways. Now get off my lawn !

Re: I think I'm one of the lucky few

If you carefully reread the posts, you'll notice that you will most likely be part of the department that is designated "Marketing", which is the department that can bloody well do what it wants, order what it wants, and everybody else can cry.

So yeah, you're one of the lucky few.

Hey IBM – Lenovo here. Sort your server factory strike out, will you?

"to gain the tremendous talent and experience of its workforce, strong from top to bottom"

That is so going to come back to haunt them when the inevitable "restructuration" starts laying off workers by the thousands.

'Hacked docs' prove MtGox has 1 MILLION Bitcoins, claim blog-snatchers

@Turtle : Thank you !

Thank you for educating me on another culture. It is always refreshing to learn something about other cultures, and it is always humbling to realize that one projects one's own way of thinking into the wrong context.

I will keep that in mind for future reference.