Posts by Pascal Monett 19006 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
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.
Sure. If you use the Office 2010 format.
I know quite a few big companies who have Office 2010. They are not going over all the documents they have ever created to convert them to the newest format.
So today, we still have loads of bulky ASCII files that are uncompressed. It's not because the newest version of something includes automatic compression that all companies set aside everything they do to spend weeks going over their archives and converting it all to the latest and greatest.
Agree totally. I am convinced that there is no chance for a hand grenade to go off unexpectedly under any circumstances that can happen in a place.
If the reverse were true, you'd have no troop transports containing soldiers with hand grenades. Given the number of men that have been transported in full battle equipment over the years, if hand grenades had a tendancy to go off after a sudden jolt, I think we'd know about it.
Ah but the illusion is that is is us who are deciding, because that lump is making the decisions "we" programmed into it.
A fallacy, of course, because the lump is just processing virtual ones and zeros that happen to have an impact on our economy. The lump doesn't even know what it is doing.
I have a fantasy that, one day, we do finally invent AI. And, when we tie AI to everything that we do, it stops working. When we ask it why, it just answers "get a life".
There is not a snowball's proverbial that I replace my watch with anything, ever.
I like my watch. It gives me the time, precisely, every day of the year, and it looks nice enough to me.
That's all I ask of it, and it does it to perfection.
I am NOT going to start faffing about with effing buttons and whatnots on my wrist.
Now get off my lawn !
Not exactly what you said, but just a fortnight ago I got a panicked call from an acquaintance about how his PC was locked by the equivalent French authority for illegal filesharing. Indeed, he could no longer access the Internet from that PC.
I know the guy. He doesn't have a chance in Hell to have installed a filesharing tool, he doesn't even know what that is, nor where to get one. Yep, he's just a n00b, and good on him too.
I calmed him down immediately and told him that was most certainly a scam. I asked him for the exact warning message, and in two clicks I got him proof that it was a scam. Then we set about fixing the issue (okay, I set about fixing the issue).
My point is, there are people who will be caught by this. Honest people, who will be honestly afraid and won't have a knowledgeable friend to turn to for help.
Shame on those crooks.
Not gritted teeth.
But I think penny arcade said it best, so just go check them out.
All these billions spent on IT systems and someone is worried that it is getting old ? What, is there not a janitor in charge of dusting the things off ? Is there not a maintenance contract for replacing the capacitors that blow ?
It's about time that we get out of the PC upgrade treadmill mentality. Code does not age. Make a computer that lasts a thousand years, and your program will happily chug away for the same amount of time.
Our governmental systems SHOULD be legacy. The principle of gathering taxes is quite old, I would think that adding new tax lines is not something that requires a rethink of the whole system. The principle of redistributing taxes is also quite old, but I gather that governments do have a tendancy of doing that rather willy-nilly and without great planification, so I would not be at all surprised that there is not a clearly defined procedure suitable for handing an additional billion or two to some MPs personal buddy.
But that still does not mean that we should tear out all our systems and put in new ones every time the government changes (although the contractors would simply go berserk at the idea no doubt).
I think it all boils down to the fact that it is never a good idea to fill up a hard disk (that you use every day) to 100%.
Try it - but not with data that is important to you. You won't like the result. Even NTFS breaks down when reaching the disk storage limit. It's a consquence of how the disk works. The worst of it is that it doesn't happen all at once. For a while, you'll be fine at 99%. Then, one day, your disk will just be unreadable. Game over. And yes, I've seen this happen to friends of mine. More than once.
So, to keep your data safe and your disk in good working condition, you ensure that your data never goes above 90% of your available disk space.
That obviously scales to disk arrays and massive online storage warehouses, because they all still depend on the same 3.5" HDD that you have at home.
At least, I think that's what this is all about.
Any time I hear someone telling me that planning is no longer necessary, I cringe.
Here, we are being told that we no longer have to worry about a single application taking up 80% of the shared storage space.
I beg to differ. If a single application takes up 80% of my allocated storage, I think I'd pretty damn well better know why and have planned for it beforehand, because if this is a surprise, then it puts in question the whole data structure that I have put in place.
Sure, I understand that all I have to do is subscribe to an additional block of shared storage. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't have planned it beforehand.
Planning is never an option.
Who is spaffing it up now ? You. And me. We all are, in our monthly Internet fees.
Because, if I am not mistaken, everyone on the Internet is paying for that connection. So if I were told that I could have a "secure from all spying" connection at €5 more than my actual connection fee, I just might say yes - on the principle of the matter.
And I think there are a lot of people like me.
"Just how cheaper calls and an open internet trickle down into a more innovative business sector (startups are anticipated as the engine of growth) isn't explained."
That's because startups don't have a chance of growing any more. If they do get noticed, they are either bought or, if the startup is stubborn, lawsuited out of business with predatory patent accusations.
There will be no startup on the european-wide telco business, I can guarantee that.
And that is the whole issue. We have no way of knowing what tools the NSA may have, or just how that might make their contributions a weakness.
Which means that now, someone (or, more likely, several someones) will have to go over the whole thing again with a fine-toothed comb and a spirit of paranoia, in order to vet once again the work that has already been done.
And even when that is done, there is no being sure that nothing was missed, because we don't know what the NSA can do.
This is probably the worst possible fallout of the whole NSA debacle. Trust is gone, and with it, our security and peace of mind.
To make it short : ignorance really is bliss.
I believe that the term "modern humans" refers to something more in the line of this.
As for using tools, the linked article clearly states that "Homo erectus and Homo ergaster were the first of the hominina 1.3 to 1.8 million years ago. It is believed that these species were the first to use fire and complex tools", so not three million years, just two.
But hey, what's a million years between friends ?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
