Posts by Pascal Monett

Euro court slaps down insurers over gender risks

Women paid less for the same job has been corrected ?

In what universe do you live, sir ?

Killzone 3

you didn't read that right

He's not complaining about having to kill things repeatedly, he's complaining about having to kill things in the same way repeatedly.

It's the corridor crawl that is the bad point, nothing else.

Apparently, there are a small number of scenarios which allow for different tactics (stealth, flanking), but these are too few compared to the rest, which is just wearing down the enemy before advancing to wear down the next batch.

NO-SH*T CURE FOR BALDNESS discovered by accident

Shhh ! You hear that ?

That is the sound of a tidal wave of entirely new spam heading toward your mailbox.

Sarkozy: Microsoft represents all that is great about France

Indeed

They really do give it to anybody these days.

Google Apps boss says cloud computing is your destiny

"build confidence over time"

Oh, but I am 100% confident right now.

I am confident that this cloud thingy will expose my data at one point or another. I am confident that the cloud will not be available precisely the day I need it the most. I am confident that anything I put on the cloud will be used to target specific ads at me.

That is why I will keep my data locally, thank you. Unless you have real magic in your fingers, you are not going to get through my hardware firewall to sift through my data locally, so having it exposed is not possible.

And if my PC dies ? Well first, if that happens I won't be able to access my data whether or not it is on a cloud, and second, that's why you have backups - to recover your last one when the PC works again.

I see zero benefit for me in this cloudy thing, but I see golden opportunity for hackers and marketeers. Hmm, marketeers - that must be why this cloud is growing.

Steelseries World of Warcraft mouse and keyboard

The mouse I like

I like the look, and 14 buttons is nothing to sneeze at.

As for the keyboard, sorry but I prefer my Logitech G15.

Of course, you must know that I own a MS Strategic Commander (look it up). That means that, for customizable keys and stuff, I have a solution that nobody can even approach.

But the mouse, I like.

Microsoft loses global ad head to Facebook

"We look forward to continuing to expand our relationship with them"

In context, I take that to mean "We look forward to poaching even more MS talent".

Texas antitrust investigators request Google 'ad rate formula'

Turn over the formula ?

Will. Never. Happen.

I predict Google will even expatriate its headquarters if that is the only solution.

Money gone, people gone: Oracle's open-source blowback

Unreliability of Oracle servers ?

Ouch.

This whole story stinks of egomania and power grab. Not Oracle's finest hour.

Mozilla: 'Internet Explorer 9 is not a modern browser'

"(IE9 is) meant to suit real-world practices"

Sure, and we all know that, for Microsoft, real-world is what their valued customers are doing.

You think you're a valued customer ? No you're not, unless your name is part of the Fortune 1000. Those are the "real world" for Microsoft.

You and me and the millions upon millions of Windows licensees count for chickenshit at Microsoft.

And I highly doubt that developers have much say, even if they do work in Fortune 1000 companies. Their managers probably have more clout, which means IE9 is going to do what highly-paid suits want it to, not what the vast majority of its users want it to.

Business as usual then.

Apple suppliers: Child labor, bribery, suicides

"Gates is actually out in the world doing great good with his Trust"

Ooh, the world's richest man (or 2nd richest, whatever) is spending one percent of his fortune on poor people, isn't he nice ?

Well, okay, it's obviously good that he's doing that, but do not forget that he's just spending the interest, not the capital.

So let's not transform him into St Gates yet, shall we ?

Wanna puff the Old Republic? Only if you do it for free

That's an idea

Except that I give it a month before Bioware amends its stance and refuses to support the Fansite A because they will have found the link between the two.

But I'm not interested in anything EA anyway, so this is pure rhetoric on my part.

Kid spanks a grand on Xbox using Mum's bank card

more like

a troll and his tool

Julian Assange wins peace prize

Is it possible for you

to read The Reg in the spirit that it is written, i.e. with biting sarcasm ?

No, apparently not.

No, no

More of a TOOL, truth be told

Google to Microsoft: You're stealing our search results!

Well that makes for MS this month, when's the third ?

First we learned that MS forgot how to implement IMAP in its WP7 phone thingy, now we learn that it can't do search properly either and is scraping results off Google.

Two bad points in two days, that must be a record of sorts.

In any case, I'm interested in finding out what I may read tomorrow.

Elon Musk looking to get into 'black' spy sat market

"That will certainly upset the aerospace titans"

Ouch, cry me a river. If Musk is there with a more performing solution that is also more economical, the laws of capitalism state that he should be getting the market.

If the so-called aerospace "titans" want to keep their position, they only need to create a feasible and economical solution to get into space that beats anything else out there.

Funny that one guy with money can beat a whole industry supposedly full of bright minds. Seems that the one guy hired better minds than the rest.

Or maybe the industry is holding their bright minds back, or bogging them down in administrative nonsense that takes time away from actual work.

Either way, the underdog is besting the establishment, and where progress is concerned, that can only be a good thing.

Cold call scareware scammers aim to bring Mac fans into the fold

"they weren't even trying..."

That made me laugh !

Then that made me sad.

LinkedIn to go public this year

Countdown to trashy stuff started

LinkedIn is going public ? Not long after that the quality of service and opportunity for abuse will no doubt go in diametrically opposite directions.

So thank you for warning me. Now I know that, as soon as I see anything fishy on LinkedIn, it'll be time to destroy that account.

CoD: Black Ops 'not fit for purpose', fans claim

My how times change

To think that, back when I was a young'un, you could host your very own Quake III server and have friends connect to it. That was back when I had a 1MB connection.

Now, Internet connection speeds have grown pretty much all over the place (well, except in Blighty, from I read around here), computer hardware is much, much more powerful than it was is 1999, and we now have the luxury of buying games that no longer allow personal servers.

Yeah, maybe there was server hacking. Yeah, there were client hacks making some pricks unkillable and able to shoot through walls. But if you played with your friends, you didn't get those issues, now did you ?

Oh, right, I see the problem. Friends. Nowadays that's just a number on a Facebook page.

Samsung TV app competition - no winners here

"Fast forward a streaming offering off the end and the TV crashes."

That is exactly why I want my TV to remain a dumb display terminal.

Why, oh why is there so much pressure to include programming into every single kitchen/room appliance we have ?

The TV we currently have works fine. Shows whatever the input is transmitting, never ever should crash for any reason except hardware.

The DVD player can crash (even though I don't like the amount of code they put in there), doesn't harm the TV. The Media Player can (and will) crash, doesn't affect the TV. The bloody BluRay player will crash, but the TV stays rock solid.

Can anyone say Single Point Of Failure ? If your TV is blue screening, you can have as many consoles, DVD players and other peripherals you want, they are useless because the frakkin' TV cannot resolve its code !

That IS NOT a situation I want to experience.

Apple patents miracle combo mouse-keyboard

Indeed

I have a keyboard and a mouse and I fail to see what all the hoopla is about.

Of course, I never use "smartphones", or tablets or any other digital thingy outside of a PC or a DVD reader, so I never will have any use for this kind of stuff.

Passenger cleared after TSA checkpoint stare-down

“Annoying the TSA is not a crime,”

Somehow I doubt that that notion will catch on. TSA agents have (apparently) dark uniforms, just like USA police. The public always reacts the same to people in dark uniforms - they obey.

It's nice to know that someone had the balls (and the willpower) to go through with his idea and be vindicated by a court (it really is high time this "security" nonsense at airports was brought to a stop), but you won't be able to do that in a bank, my friend, however much you're willing to.

iTunes gifting scam plunges Reg reader into the red

And that just demonstrates the sheeple mentality

If we were actual, thinking people, once such a report became public there would be a flurry of account cancellations until the Itunes store became a virtual desert.

Only then would Apple understand that its policy and behavior is unacceptable, and change it.

But here ? In this reality, Apple conducts itself like any unwashed street tramp having successfully hawked damaged wares to the unwitting at the curb - when said witless numpty wises up a bit and complains, the tramp just stares him down and turns his back, laughing all the way to the bank.

And the numpty, pissed off though he is, continues dealing with the tramp, thus justifying the haughtiness in the first place.

Seems to me that there has been a world-wide ablation of testes in the current generation. Given the fact that beauty stores see more and more men coming in to purchase creams and lotions, I guess it was inevitable.

I'm going to buy a shotgun and a dog and retire to the mountains now.

"Pay with PayPal if necessary."

Yeah, like PayPal is more trustworthy than Itunes. That's like burning your eyebrows instead of singeing your foot.

Way to go.

Microsoft Windows guru turns to cybercrime (fiction)

"Endorsements have come from [...] White House cyber security czar"

That kind of diminishes the credibility of the book in my eyes.

Writing good fiction is difficult. Writing good political thrillers is difficult. Writing good code is difficult as well, but keyboard jockey skills do not translate to story writer skills. I doubt that this text will be in any way captivating. It might be technically realistic, but the usual over-the-top adjectives of the New York Times Bestseller list will most probably not be used on this.

That said, it will certainly be good enough for idea-starved Hollywood. We might get another Sandra Bullock film out of it (or six, the way Hollywood is going these days). Whether that is a good thing or not I leave to the reader to judge.

Smartphone makers to embrace multi-core chips

a fallacy ?

The fact that it is now virtually impossible to double the speed of a CPU has what impact on your argument ?

Not to mention the fact that multi-core systems are almost always benchmarking better than single-core systems in all user tasks, and in any mult-core enabled game or application ?

Are you the kind of person who dissed the 486DX line because the CPU was no longer synchronized with the bus ?

Renault denies tech at heart of spy scandal

Changing the story, are they ?

First I heard of it, the story was all about how a few engineers were fired for suspected industrial espionage. The way it was told led me to believe it had something to do with technology, especially since the fact that the engineers in question were all part of the department in charge of electrical vehicles was heavily referenced.

Now I hear that it is not industrial espionage, but business methods that these people were selling. Well excuse me but that is ridiculous on two counts. First of all, it is an about-face for the initial accusation - never a good sign when an accuser changes the why of his accusation. Second, Renault's business methods are not worth spying to retrieve - Renault has no business method. If they had one, their cars wouldn't break down so often.

I had a very interesting discussion three years ago with a person working in Germany for a company that makes parts for the automobile industry in general, and sometimes for Renault. That person told me that, of all the customers his company had, Renault was the only one for which the specifications were never complete. In other words, they had to call Renault time and time again to get an idea of how resistant, pliable, brittle or whatever the part had to be.

If that is due to a method, I don't think there is a company on Earth that needs to steal it.

Blizzard green-lights fan-made StarCraft mod

What was that, Blizzard ?

Being a dick is now routine procedure ?

My, how times have changed. Once upon a time it was unthinkable to attack someone else's work without being 100% sure that you had good cause and the moral upper hand. Nowadays, it's done automatically at the slightest whiff of challenge, with a provision to maybe reverse the decision a few months after it's too late.

Blizzard, you disappoint me greatly.

Bot attacks Linux and Mac but can't lock down its booty

Not able to survive a reboot ?

But it's a well-known fact that Linux users never reboot their machines - which gives this crap a lot of time for acting out its nefarious duties.

Razer StarCraft II peripherals set

Hang on, did I see a cable on that mouse ?

They're making such a highly priced set of kit and they didn't even make the mouse wireless ?

I have a G7 mouse, a G15 keyboard and a Microsoft Strategic Commander (look it up, it's the best). Personally, I find no other combination of any interest whatsoever.

Changing the key color following the situation of the base is cool, but I don't find that really useful. If you can't keep track of alerts, you're a goner, whatever the abilities of your keyboard. Being able to assign specific macros to any key seems interesting, although I'd like to see how that works in practice. Still, the G15 has macro keys, and a LED screen, which is really useful.

No, the cool factor is sky-high, but I don't see that the set brings me anything technical I don't already have.

Windows 7 Phone glitch spews phantom data

400MB of data ?

From a bloody smartphone ? Where do they get all that data in the first place ?

Seagate sees big drive capacity jump coming

"but who else is going to use it"

Uh, gamers ?

Let me check the folder size for some of my favorite games :

Battlefield 2 takes 9.9GB

Crysis Warhead takes 3.7GB

Freelancer takes 4.1GB

Hellgate London takes 6.8GB

Lord of the Rings Online takes 12.9GB

Starcraft II takes 8.7GB

Company of Heroes takes 3.9GB

and my Steam folder, with dozens of games, takes up 95.5GB.

Sure, this only takes 145GB in all. You might think that a 250GB disk should be amply enough. Yes it would - for now. But neither you nor I know what games I will add to my collection in the future, and I'll be darned if I want to start worrying about disc space again like I had to ten years ago (when game size on disk was counted in MB, not GB).

I bought a 1.5TB disk for the express purpose of installing my games on it. Yes, I have more than 1.2TB available on it, but that means I have space to install a lot more games. More importantly, it means that defragging is not an issue, and the disk can manage its sectors without problem either. Plus, I have peace of mind and room to grow.

Finally, the disk only cost me 89€. Hey, that's the price I paid for 320GB back in 2007 !

'Methanotroph' bacteria feasted on blown BP rig's methane belch

Your comment seemed interesting

Right up to the point where you reference the Christian Science Monitor.

That's when you lost all credibility and became ridiculous and hypocritical because of your rant against someone else's "slant".

The next time you want to play the high road game, try and reference a REAL scientific publication. You'll look better and your argument will be taken seriously.

Facebook riddled by 'my first ever status message' scam app

Beautiful

So you can now get in one file all the inane and useless blabber you posted on Facebook by uploading it from your PC ?

And you call that "genuinely useful" ?

Interesting.

For sale: 50,000 compromised iTunes accounts

"no action taken so far against the iTunes pillagers"

Of course, it is much easier to take down a lone Bittorrent user and claim "victory" against "piracy" then to actually go after a real pirate using criminal methods to make money. With real pirates there's all this "foreign country" stuff and nonsense about "different laws" and you learn, shocked, that the entire world is not actually subject to a U.S. court of justice.

Bummer.

So you go back to sending threatening letters to P2P users and hope to cash in a little something while real pirates turn your "security" into a joke and laugh all the way to the bank. But that's not important to you because the real pirates only swindle . . . your customers.

Google pinpoints bugs that send texts to wrong people

Charles, you missed the point

Displaying a "Please Wait" dialogue was not proposed as a workaround, but as a feature that should have been included from the start and would have avoided people clicking around before the thing was bloody ready in the first place.

Google sneak peeks Android for fondleslabs

too young to remember ?

No, no, you meant to say "too young to know".

That little tidbit about Xerox is going straight to the "Obscure Origins Of Computer Things" history section.

Micron revs flashy SSD line

Missing one thing

What I would like in my PC is an SSD for the Windows partition, a RAM disk for the swap file and my HDDs for data storage.

I am missing the RAM disk. I would like a PCI card with two double-channel slots, enabling up to 16GB of DDR3 to be used as a virtual disk unit. Aw heck, even DDR1 would be fast enough.

Come on, people, it's not like it hasn't been done before. I still have an old i286-compatible card that held up to 8 1MB EDO sticks back in prehistoric 1993. And Gigabyte did one in 2009 but withdrew it not long after.

Scientologist overlord declares victory over Anonymous

"trio of dastardly villains [...] akin to cartoon characters"

So that means you can relate to them really well then, Miscavige ?

Don't worry, I'm sure they haven't forgotten you - it's just that you've been so quite lately they found another mole to whack.

They'll be coming back now and you'll be able to play again. I promise.

Boffins crack walnut-shaped Iapetus moon mystery

Extremely unlikely indeed

1. Nowhere in the article is it said that the moonlet was "perfectly aligned" with anything. It is, apparently, the equatorial ridge that is perfectly aligned. The moonlet didn't just appear above the moon in the perfect spot, it had an orbit that decayed and it "gradually descended towards the surface" before breaking up.

The article specifically indicates that the lowest-energy orbit is equatorial and gives the example of the rings of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. With so many examples and with the knowledge that energy naturally tends towards entropy, it is not surprising that the debris ended up over the equator since it would seem that that is the natural place for it to be.

2. Since you are such a prominent figure in exogeology, would you care to reference the articles that you have written on the subject and that have been accepted in such publications as Nature ?

You have none ?

Then just how are you qualified to doubt what "looks like" an impact ?

Especially since the article, which you seem to have skimmed over rather than read, explains clearly that "Particles would impact one by one, over and over again on the equatorial line. At first the debris would have made holes to form a groove that eventually filled up."

Thank goodness that there are actual scientists working on the subject, people who do not have preconceived notions about things and actually think all the way about a problem before offering a conclusion.

Walmart falls in with Washington's war on terror

What's next ?

Summary executions, obviously.

DHS videos in stores ?

Why wait ? Put a large screen on a blimp, include 1000W speakers and broadcast continuously over all major US cities.

Include army checkpoints at all entry points of all major cities (already covered by the blimps) in order to ensure proper population control (hello citizen, have you found a terrorist today ?), as well as hourly radio broadcasts and you end up with a country that would make a certain WWII dictator positively green with envy.

Firefox: freedom's just another word for 'kerching!'

ISP bandwidth

Sorry, but you're not making much sense either. Everyone who accesses the Internet is paying an ISP - therefor ISPs are the Internet.

And since everyone is paying them, everyone pays the Internet.

The only real problem is that ISPs are trying to equate the amount of data traveling through their pipes to a charge that needs to be paid for, which is patently ridiculous. You can make electricity go through a copper wire for decades, it won't be any worse for the wear afterwards.

Intel reveals 'the billion dollar lost laptop problem'

There is only one kind of security that works

That is : educating the user.

No amount of hardware thingamajigs or encypto-magic voodoo is going to beat a user who just couldn't be bothered - and if there is one thing that the Internet has proven beyond all discussion, it's that there's always a better idiot.

And if the security is transparent to the user, than that means it is tied into the physical object and thus available for decryption to the criminal mastermind.

No, I'm sorry, but you will not be able to ensure 100% security with a dongle, encryption or any other technobabble excuse. To pretend otherwise is just a bald-faced lie.

Rumbustious Rambus rampaging rebarbatively, again

"china will gladly help"

No it won't. Even the Chinese know that you don't go pissing off your highest debtor - he might default on his payments.

Xbox modder prosecution dropped like white-hot potato

Fair and balanced ?

Well whaddya know ! On the one hand, the judge knocks down the fair use argument for the defense, and on the other blasts the prosecution for manhandling the accusation process.

Sounds like this judge is actually on the ball on this case !

What is the point of End Point Protection?

"the problem is Windows PCs"

Only because, as of now, most users are on Windows.

Once you get a good share of users on Mac OS, Linux whatever or something else, the laws of statistics will ensure that you'll get your share of morons there too.

At that point, you'll see them do all the crazy, moronic things they possibly can, and you might even find out that non-admin accounts can wreak a lot more havoc than you ever thought possible.

Windows security (ahem) has been tested, and found lacking. That is a fact. That fact does not mean that the alternatives are any better. They have not been tested yet.

The problem is not PCs. The problem is users.

And that problem is not going away because of a platform.

Monarchist marks fall for faux royal wedding ticket site

Wait a minute there

So the Sun reports on this scam and not only does it totally fail to check its legitimacy but it one-ups the scam site by adding a fake golden ticket ?

Well if I ever read the Sun I'd be swearing that I wouldn't any more.

Buffy to slay her way back into cinemas

"a completely new reboot"

If a reboot is supposed to renew the series, what exactly is a "completely new" reboot ?

Is it possible to make a totally old reboot ?

For that matter, is it possible for Hollywood execs to stop taking us for morons ?

I guess not.