Posts by Pascal Monett

Facebook, Google, and the war to lock you in

Tell me

Do you really believe that those "options" you mention actually work ?

Facebook game outfit Zynga files for $1bn IPO

The wonders of mathematics

2 billion minutes a day boils down to 23 148 minutes per second.

Minutes per second ? Can we make a new yardstick out of that ?

Facebook promises 'awesome' launch next week

"I deleted my FB account and never regretted it"

And you honestly think that your account data has been deleted ?

LightSquared admits it will knock out 200,000 sat-navs

More and more billions

They get quite bandied about, those poor billions, don't they ? The GPS accuses LightSquared to cost the country almost $100 billion (why stop at $96, by the way ?), LightSquared says they'll generate $120 billion so it's fine.

Well no, it is not fine. If you kill 9 people to save 12, I doubt very much that the relatives of the 9 dead will appreciate.

In other news, piracy costs upwards of $1200 billion per year (following my latest guesstimate which is just as reliable as anything Gartner can say on the subject).

Man, thank God we have an economy so robust that it can just go on working despite all those billions going down the drain !

Office 365: Can Microsoft replace Microsoft?

I used to use MS Office 2000

But when I switched to Win7, it became a hassle to install properly. Every time I wanted to open a .doc, it would complain about something not being installed. The first twenty times I slotted in the CD, as per request, and got a complement of installation - at least that is what was said.

After that, I just cancelled the installation popup and worked as usual. When I got fed up with the bloomin' popup, I installed LibreOffice and it does everything I need it to do - intuitively.

And the rest of my family has no issues with LibreOffice either.

So MS Office is now permanently retired from my home PCs. And I don't see any reason to go back to it.

Yeah, but

The point is, you only pay once. That is very much the preferred regime for any private individual, and for many small companies as well.

Paying every month for the privilege of having someone in India respond to your support calls in gibberish is becoming more and more unacceptable. But hey, the guys that got the outsourcing idea in the first place are rich today, no doubt about that.

US Supremes dump violent video game ban

"feels the sensation of blood on his face and hands"

I want to know what kind of gaming rig this judge has, because I can blow any number of zombies to bits in Left 4 Dead 2, I have never felt any sensation of blood whatsoever.

'Robots can save America', says Obama

"paying decent wages and supporting its workers in comfortable middle-class lifestyles"

Surely that should read "paying decent wages and supporting its robots in comfortable middle-class lifestyles" ?

I mean, since when has American capitalism worried about the lifestyle of its workers ? If the robots are the ones working, then it is the robots who get the decent working conditions.

You're not meaning to tell me that employers are going to keep humans on the payroll if it is the robots doing the job ? That would be counterproductive, and the beancounters will torpedo that idea after the first quarter.

Especially if they've been replaced by robots as well.

PS3 hacker Hotz accepts job at Facebook

What a shame

To have shown so much promise, only to end up Facebooked.

Lego Star Wars to be celebrated in TV special

"George Lucas has picked up the building blocks again by readying a Lego Star Wars TV special"

That should read :

"George Lucas has found one more excuse to milk the endless souvenir pit of his fans once again by destroying yet another successful thing associated with Star Wars and will produce a Lego Star Wars TV special which has the potential to suck slightly less than his previous attempt, the widely embarrassing Star Wars Christmas Special. The horror will be unleashed some time this automn, and hopefully will not destroy too many budding careers."

There, corrected it for you.

Google kills sickly health, energy projects

"lack of interest from would-be customers"

Well colour me astonished. After all, why wouldn't I want to trust everyday details of my private life to some company that will store it oversees where I have no recourse in case of trouble, and no guarantee of proper privacy ?

Really, I can't imagine why the masses didn't flock to this unique opportunity to be profiled in a very, very intimate way in exchange for the pleasure of perusing one's own life online (and maybe someone else's life if the proper hack gets known).

AMD trumpets next-gen GPU architecture

"I want to create realities that you can't tell that you're not looking through a window"

Nice. How about creating realities that I can't tell I'm in a computer game ?

Such as trees that fall in front of a tank, or get blown to shreds by bombs, or torch and burn down if a flamethrower is pointed at them. Or walls that cannot resist a tank, not to mention packs of C4, and houses that get flattened by aerial bombardement.

How about realistic craters from a bomb ? One that a soldier can hide in and shoot from ? And can we once and for all get rid of indestructible doors that only open once a certain condition has been realised, and ignores any attempt at brute force ?

Making prettier environments is nice, but I'd wager Medal of Honor, Battlefield 2 and Gears of War have already demonstrated a very pretty world. Making environments more "realistic" does not mean just veined leaves on trees.

Facebooking juror gets 8 months

What do you expect ?

It's supposed to be "justice of the PEOPLE".

Be happy in the cloud with the right SLA

"Contracts [...] can change, often without notification"

Sorry, but no.

Legislation states very clearly that a contract is a binding agreement between two parties. Any change must be met with agreement by both parties. That's the most important thing I learned in my feeble amount of commercial law studies as an accountant.

If SLA contracts can change without agreement of one party, then SLAs are worth no more than EULAs and should be ignored as such.

I am eagerly waiting for the day someone will finally have the guts and determination to disembowel this travesty of commercial contract once and for all, preferably with a red-hot katana.

Once upon a time, a contract was eye-to-eye, verbal agreement sealed by handshake. Once it was shook on, it was inviolate and unalterable, come flood or earthquake or meteor.

Today, commerce is nothing but a shark-infested pit filled to the gills with liars and nancys who will go to any length to not own up to their responsibilities and respect the word that was given. It is high time that the law was properly imposed on all this nonsense.

Duke Nukem flack eats words over threat to reviewers

One thing I find really interesting

Apparently, some people are blaming the console version for the amount of negativity in the reviews.

Independantly of the gameplay, which should not change between an Xbox and a PC, there appears to be technical issues and exaggeratedly long load times.

I remember a time where console fanatics were heralding the "death of the PC" due to the "perfect accomodation" of a known platform with set characteristics versus the heterogenous nature of the PC gaming hardware.

Seems that the PC continues winning.

Europe flashes report card on data protection

So, the EU is at least partially useful ?

The EU has generally been at the forefront where personal privacy is concerned, and good on them for that.

Unfortunately, the EU has been seriously lacking in backbone when it comes to standing up to the outrageous demands of the US government devil spawn, Homeland Security, and that is a shame.

Google Instant Pages: Search sites rendered before you click

Yawn

Let me see, generally speaking a web page shows up in 1.5 seconds. In human time, that's already pretty much instantaneous.

But of course, in a population already living in the now, it is pure entitlement to have everything RIGHT NOW, thus this product will probably be a success.

Unless, of course, people start clamoring for the first 5 links to be prerendered - which they will do tomorrow.

I wonder what happens to malware in this scenario ? Make a search that has its first link pointing to a hacked site spewing drive-by downloadable gunk, but click on the 3rd search result and never know where you got the virus from - now that is an interesting scenario.

EA: early Battlefield 3 buyers will gain no advantage

"its often cheaper to buy physical media than download from steam"

Um, excuse me, but you obviously don't have Steam.

I do, and I have gotten games for €1.50 off it. I got Left 4 Dead 2 for all of €5 by taking advantage of a weekend special. Sure, I didn't get it the day it came out, but I am patient enough.

I do believe that, however patient you may be, you'll never get a brand-new Left 4 Dead 2 DVD for €5.

Ever.

Venice not in major peril after all - new research

"Unqualified reports of this nature entirely undermine the debate on global warming"

Yeah, whereas fudging the data to fit preconcieved notions really upholds it.

You seem to have trouble understanding the scientific approach, which is logical since one has to have a certain level of intelligence to grasp its method.

Fortunately, it can be resumed in a simple concept : analyze the data every which way you can think of and see what fits with reality. When you have eliminated everything that does not fit, you can start drawing conclusions.

The problem with the scientific approach is that of the basic human attention span : anything longer than 15 seconds and the average homo sapiens glazes over and goes into a coma.

Unfortunately, science takes more than 15 seconds to establish the facts, so many, many people take one side and stick to it because the whole issue is way too complicated for the average human brain. And apparently, for some "scientists" as well.

Climatology has to do with thermodynamics, and any professor worth his salt will tell you that we haven't nailed that domain down yet. So all this climate hoopla is far from over and will only end when every single test had been made, compared to reality, extensively discussed and debated, and proper conclusions drawn.

Oh, one more thing : all that discussing, debating, comparing and concluding is supposed to be done by scientists, not journalists and very much not commentors.

Any sane person will know that we have to wait for the proper people to tell us what the facts are. Right now, nobody knows for sure.

That is why these articles keep cropping up. And they should, because the first rule of science is skepticism.

Games co Epic resets passwords after hack attack

Wait a minute

First we got Sony, and nobody was sorry.

The we Codemasters, and hardly anyone batted an eyelid.

Now its Epic, and feathers are barely ruffling.

Does this start to look like a checklist, or what ?

E3 2011: the showstoppers

Same thing here

The videos for BF3 are simply stunning, no contest from me. However, I'll wait for the reviews to find out if :

- coop with bots still stupidly limited

- single player map size still stupidly limited

- no personal stats on private servers

- LAN ability severely restricted without Internet connection to control it

The basic question is : has EA understood the value of the fanbase and will EA embrace it this time around ? Because they certainly didn't before.

So if I see that they still haven't this time around, well I'm sorry but I'll pass, however tempting the title may seem.

Why, you may ask ? Because multiplayer is only good with friends. The larger Internet multiplayer environment is much too full of morons and griefers to amuse me. I'd rather play with bots.

Lots of 'em.

Can cloud save the NHS?

Indeed

The cloud can only bring benefits to people who actually know what they're doing.

NHS has a looong history of not knowing what the blazes is going on anywhere, so cloud will only further muddy things up.

It's a bad idea, and therefor NHS will pick it up and run with it as far as possible. Expect to soon hear "hey, we're putting NHS IT in the cloud, all will be better as soon as we're done". And it'll only cost £1.5 billion".

Microsoft loses Supreme patent fight over Word

"the entire US software patent system need review"

I agree, albeit with one caveat : Microsoft is not the one that should be doing the review.

Hypocritical ?

No ! No! Dear me, no ! That will not do, not at all.

In the Manager's Lexicon this is called Good Business Sense, not Hypocrisy !

I'm sorry but you'll have to redo your Management 101 : Proper Terms And Concepts unit, otherwise we'll never be able to make a CEO out of you.

BioWare blows brains with intro cinematics for Star Wars MMO

Nice video

But unfortunately, it seems chock full of Sith and Jedi, just like almost every other SW-themed game out there (Republic Commando being a notable exception).

I like the SW universe very much. I am unhappy with the fact that nobody seems to be able to make any other part of it interesting.

Ex-Google engineer dubs Goofrastructure 'truly obsolete'

The software is 10 years old ?

So what ? Is is rusting ? No. Does it work ? Yes.

If a 10-year-old program causes so much intellectual anguish to that guy, he'd better not learn that banks are using 50-year-old Cobol code that still works a charm.

Oh, and the technology behind the steering wheel is centuries old now, does that mean we should change to joystick ? No.

Please keep this guy out of any serious industrial project. Changing everything after 5 years just because the code "is getting old" is not something we want in our daily lives. The walls of my house are over 40 years old now, and I hope they'll stay just the same for much longer.

Texas cinema texter becomes foul-mouthed movie star

I'm just waiting

For the day I can get my hands on a pocket-sized mobile phone frequency blocker.

On that day, I will go back to cinemas, confident that nobody will be texting or phoning anywhere near me (preferably in a 15m radius).

'Great Reversal' as world's forests stage a comeback

Re:"Mother Nature[..]'s self-regulation [..] has kept this planet alive for millennia"

Mother Nature has already programmed the death of this planet. It is called the Red Giant phase of our Sun, and it will happen in 5 or 6 billion years (give or take a few hundred million or so).

Before that date, nothing short of a direct collision with a wayward planet can possibly destroy Planet Earth.

Concerning Life on this planet, however, a number of things can destroy it with great efficiency. A stray Gamma-Ray Burst pointed right at us can boil the ozone in the atmosphere, thus exposing all life to drastically increased levels of UV radiation. Cancer and genetic changes will abound as life struggles to adapt. Most will fail, including probably humans.

A large asteroid, anywhere above 5 km in diameter, will most probably wipe out all life on the surface of the planet, leaving the deepest parts of the oceans as possible havens for whatever is left.

Those are just two ways that Mother Nature can put an end to life on Earth.

But Earth itself will endure. And life will most probably reappear whatever happens, as even in the worst-case scenario a propitious asteroid can re-seed the planet with the required building blocks.

Skype hangs up on users yet again

"A small number of you"

Of course it's a small number, it's always a small number.

Even if it concerns 10 million people, it's a small number since Skype has hundreds of millions of subscribers.

That's the beauty of a large customer base : you can piss off millions at a time and keep saying that it's marginal with a straight face.

Japan seeks unheard-of new uses for cell location data

Re:"phones transmit something periodically when turned off"

Do you have proof of that that you can link to here ?

Because when my phone is off, it sure as heck isn't transmitting anything. And if they did, I think someone would have already found out.

Pentagon: Hack attacks can be act of war

What else is new ?

It's the USA, people. If they want to bomb you back to the Stone Age, well, they've already proven that Geneva Convention means nothing to them, so this is but another excuse in the list.

And I'm sure that all proof needed will be treated with as much due process as the WMDs in Iraq.

What a farce.

Skype pushes gaming software down users throats

"Business users [...] would be using the business version"

In an ideal world, you're certainly right.

Unfortunately, the fact that regular Skype does conference calls along with the fact that business users rarely do more than that with it means that there is no special incentive to go to the business portal of Skype.

Meaning that, in any situation where the IT staff cannot be arsed to do it beforehand, the user will go to Skype.com and download the regular version - probably with all the free extras he can get.

LinkedIn slashes cookie lifespan after research exposes security flaws

Token gesture ?

Maybe it is (and yes, I did see what you did there), but unlike Sony, they are 1) acknowledging that there is a problem, and 2) actually attempting a first-level reaction that does have an impact.

Sure, it's not perfect, and it is not a solution either, but it's a heck of a lot better than Sony.

Euro report slates wireless comms, recommends smoke and mirrors

"best not bother with scientific proof when the risks are 'well known' "

I love that quote - sums up the entire amount of credibility right there.

In other words - zero, of course.

BT cheerfully admits snooping on customer LANs

"we don't believe that consent is necessary"

Welcome to the new corporate excuse.

I hope a judge sets them right quickly.

PlayStation Network breach will cost Sony $171m

"The figures [...] beats initial estimates of costs"

Hmm, $171 million is a lot of dough.

I wonder how much it would have cost to design the thing securely in the first place ?

Lock up your lungs, here comes Grimsvotn

alien ash invasion ?

Isn't all this ash from a purely terrestrial source, or is there something you're not telling us ?

Star probe Kepler finds many multi-world alien suns

"Seems reasonable to expect that is the norm"

No, it is not. Any scientist will tell you that very little can be concluded from a sample size of one.

The only thing that we can reasonably deduce from studying our own solar system is that other stars may have planets, some of which may be gas giants.

The reason this study is interesting is the sheer number of stars we detect that do actually have planets. To think that a full third of a given sample have planets - and a disk that is facing us so we can detect them - is simply a staggering number.

In fact, it seems to me that, if 33% of star systems we can survey just happen to have planetary discs facing us, then a fair share of the others stars most probably have planetary discs as well, just not facing us.

If that is indeed the case, then we can venture that stars with planets is indeed the norm, which, all of a sudden, gives us a staggering number of planets to visit when we finally get our stuff together for intergalactic travel.

And that gives us every reason to get our species off this planet and into the stars, because once we do, near-infinite resources will become available.

Endeavour 'nauts in epic ISS spacewalk

Seems to me . . .

that a magnetic mitt might have been more useful. Or maybe, a magnet on a stick.

Or are these bolts not magnetic ? Made of aluminum, maybe ? In any case, although it is a shame that we now have yet another piece of space debris whizzing around at high speed, a spacewalk is no walk in the park. And eight hours at a time is more than anyone should be subject to.

Google euthanizes newspaper archive scan plan

Yeah, let's all forget the past

It's not like we can learn anything from it, now is it ?

"Putting those archives online would have enormous value"

I totally agree.

It's just that Google, a private company, sees no value in it for itself.

Which just proves once again that private companies have a hard time doing things that are beneficial for anyone else than themselves, which is in their nature.

That is why we have associations and foundations - non-profit organisms who can do what is right and not what brings in money. Of course, they need billionnaires to fund them, but that is another issue.

£1.1bn Royal Navy warship finally armed, sort of

"can be fitted as and when needed"

Funny, and here I was thinking that a warship was supposed to be _prepared_.

Seems I was wrong, and the Type 45 captain can just blunder into a situation where he needs the thing and that's when he sends a tweet to get it installed. That's how it works now, right ? Or does he just download a quad Harpoon ASM missile launcher from the proper site when needed, then delete the installation afterwards ?

My, technology is a wonderful thing.

"the type 45 is the most advanced destroyer in the world"

For a vessel that has just enough weaponry to combat dinghys and low-threat pirate boats, I find your comment particularly ridiculous.

Against anything with proper ship-to-ship weapons, the Type 45 is sunk, no questions asked. The fact that it is a so-called "destroyer" just adds insult to injury.

Schmidt explains the Google way to self-erasure

oh, but of course Schmidt is right

Wait a minute, isn't "industry best practice" what gave us the subprime crises we're still trying to recover from ?

Yes, it is exactly.

Congratulations, Schmidt, even when you're trying to make yourself look good, you still manage to slip in a horror or two.

Microsoft blames old update for Xbox 360 issue

"there are no known compatibility issues"

We eagerly await reports of unknown compatibility issues.

France's official P2P monitoring firm hacked

Re:"Hard to call this a hack"

Unfortunately, that is the way it goes on the Internet these days.

If you leave your front door open and someone comes in and swipes your car keys, it's all your fault, but if a company leaves a server wide open and someone pings it, it's a hack and the judges have a ton of bricks ready.

Somehow, I think there's going to have to be a change somewhere down the line. After all, the Internet is a place where it is inevitable to find someone who's going to try to hack you, whereas I could leave my front door open for a week in my little French village and I'd still have my car keys after that.

Not that I do leave my door open, mind you.

Microsoft BPOS cloud outage burns Exchange converts

Badly-formed email ?

Where does that come from, I wonder ? I mean, the Internet is awash with all sorts of email and it manages just fine, so what particular form damages this cloud thingy so much that it falls on its face ?

Could it be more of a "badly thought-out in-cloud process for load balancing" ?

Most probably it will be put down to teething problems.

Frankly, I cannot understand the CEOs that okayed this kind of thing, and I'm quite happy they got bitten so hard. Microsoft has a dismal record of hosting anything, and that this is proving no different is no surprise.

Trust Microsoft products at your own peril, that is the lesson here.

EA reloads, aims at Activision, goes for headshot

I've seen the trailer for BF3

It is mightily impressive, I must admit. It seems to incorporate some things about destructible environments that I have been waiting for, and the quality is simply gorgeous.

That said, BF2 had one major issue - it was very difficult to get a ranked private server. Possible, but difficult. Me and my pals spent three years running around dozens and dozens of user-made maps, upping our ranks on my personal ranked server, and it worked rather well.

With Battlefield 2142, that became impossible. I do not think that there is any way to get a private ranked server for BF2142, and that is really a shame because there are way too many idiots in the world to have a public 64-slot server work well, and I dont have 63 friends with the same gaming interests as I.

So it seems to me that, given that the publisher is EA, which has a proven history of being positively anal about DRM and user restrictions, I fear that BF3, though promising from a technical standpoint, will suffer from the same lame, useless restrictions that will make basic, user-supportive things impossible.

And that, for me, means that I most probably will not be playing it, because I find no fun to be had in playing with the general public that is full of idiots, losers and griefers. I prefer playing with my friends against bots - stupid as the bots are, they're still more fun to play than regular Internet dweebs.

So, if BF3 is going to refuse private ranked servers (and I see no reason to believe it won't) and, even worse, restrict private servers to piddling 16-player-size maps, then I'm not even buying the game.

Not until someone brings out a mod to blast those restrictions away.

Then we will see the usual treadmill of EA patch that changes something that breaks the mod, mod community gets together to find the flaw and patch it or find a workaround, and start over again.

Because EA can simply not accept that anyone else actually add welcome functionality to one of its products. They're not selling games so people can have fun, no. They're selling games because that is what sells.

Coalition signs up to passenger info slurp

Meal choices ?

Just how exactly does knowing the meal choice of someone improve security against terrorism ?

Because terrorists only choose halal dishes ?

Well I'm sure that, after my state-enforced lobotomy, I'll be convinced that it is a good thing.

Source code leaked for pricey ZeuS crimeware kit

Um...

Maybe El Reg is being responsible ?

It is their duty to report the news, but is it their duty to make malware suits even more available than they already are ?

If this was a report about a cache of Anthrax, do you really think it would be a good idea to tell everyone where it is ?

Really, common sense has not survived the millenium.