Posts by Pascal Monett

IBM socialises Notes mail to stop your yammering

Speaking as a Notes consultant and developer . . .

I hate IBM. Mostly I hate how IBM has buried Notes and forgot to ever mention it since it bought Lotus.

Oh sure, IBM made Domino R5 become a real server, robust and all, with real admin tools. Sure, IBM has made Notes/Domino evolve tremendously since the last R4 "Lotus" release, to the point that the R8.5.3 version I am working with actually has next to nothing to do with the good ol' R4.6 client I started doing LotusScript with.

But where are the commercials for this great (from a dev point of view) product ? Where were the seminars to bring in management and make them understand the power of this product ?

What little was done is now gone, companies are moving en masse to Outlook/Sharepoint because IBM wanted to push Websphere, of which they sold 20 copies (give or take a few). So not only IBM has lost a vast installed user base on a great product, but IBM has practically actively pushed them into the arms of MS who is only now offering a similar product with inferior capabilities.

Where I'm working now I hear the Sharepoint team (5 guys) quoting a dev time of no less than three months to do a library booking app. I took a look at the specs and I could do that by myself in Notes in about a week, tops, including user meetings with the inevitable "can we have this button here instead ?".

So I'm honing my Sharepoint skills now, and considering the definition of the term "job security".

No thanks to you, IBM.

"the sort of enormous corporation that upgrades software as infrequently as possible"

Notes/Domino upgrades are free for licensed users.

Historically speaking, it is a proven thing that upgrading is beneficial to performance and has minimal impact on application functionality.

In short, there is very little reason not to upgrade, and cost has next to nothing to do with it.

Of course, in a complex network environment, there may be more things to control in the prep stage, but in "enormous corporations", I don't think that is an issue in itself.

Speaking for me, I know of no company in my economic area that is using less than R7. All companies I deal with are on R8.5.2 at least, which means practically the latest build pre-R9.

But hey, Notes-bashing is a sport, ain't it ?

I've got a super free multi-petabyte storage box for you: /dev/null

So I've seen it now. Impressive collection of personal data, to be sure, what with the number of keystrokes, mails and steps taken. It's also an impressive show of analytical power that Mathematica demonstrates.

And ?

Apart from giving this guy a chart saying that he's worked a lot, what does one get out of it ?

I don't see much use in a chart telling me that I send more mail now than I did ten years ago. Does that mean I'm wasting time sending mail, or does it mean that I'm more occupied and doing more efficient things with email ? I know the answer already, and I didn't need to saddle my life with a bunch of stat collectors to tell me.

I salute the performance in monitoring, but frankly I don't see what it can tell me about what I might need to do in the future, and forecasting future needs is the only reason to collect all that data in the first place.

So no, I don't see that "everybody" will be doing that in the future. Actually, I don't see that anyone will be doing that in the future. Having a good beer is so much more fun.

Experts agree: Your next car will be smarter than you

"direct a driver where there is an open parking spot"

And that "open" spot is open because the timer ran out ?

No thanks. An open spot is a spot where there is no car, not a spot where the meter has reached the end of the alloted time.

There is a rather big difference there, and it's the difference between being able to park and calling the machine names whilst searching for another spot and ignoring the stupid computer telling us we just passed another "open" spot that was full of car.

Cue a bunch of enraged drivers madly competing for an inexistent spot in the same area, situation degenerating into fisticuffs when the inevitable collision ensues . . .

I can see this as a perfect scenario for totally decredibilizing the whole idea and ridiculing the company that markets it - and that is even without the Big Brother connotations.

As for the whole assisted driving concept, in my opinion it will only work when the vast majority of cars are of that type. Personally, I will adamantly refuse to drive a car that tells me what to do and actively keeps me from driving as I see fit. I will, however, gladly get in to a vehicle where I can say where I want to go, then have a snack and read something on the way without bothering with the whole "driving" concept.

And yes, I know I can call a cab, but most cabbies don't like food in the car (and rightly so). Besides, I don't like waiting for cab either. If my car could drive me around automagically, then the crumbs are my problem and my choice.

The battle for control at the firm that brought SSD to the enterprise

"the company's future is at risk"

Love that kind of argument. We can't change now, we'd look weak !

Yeah, like you look strong now.

And name me one company who's future is not at risk (for a relative value of future).

No, really: Austrians develop hi-tech jewellery made out of concrete

A bit disappointed, actually

I was expecting to see concrete jewellery, not regular jewellery with sprayed-on mumbo-jumbo-make-it-sound-special rebar.

Japan's rare earth discovery bad news for China's monopoly plans

I'm willing to bet that a fleet of "fishing" junks is already on its way.

NORKS says USA attack took it offline ... as if anyone could tell

"despicable and base acts"

Dear $deity, I shudder to think of the poor router's ports and how sore they must be.

Because obviously there was no KY in sight, I'll wager.

Outages plague Hotmail and Outlook users

Re: Stop moaning it's free

It's a service. Even if it is a free service, even if there is no SLA and no guarantee of service, it is still something that the company is offering that is supposed to be useful.

The fact that the service is not available is a valid cause for complaint, even if the service is free. The only thing that users cannot ask for is compensation for lost time or messages. But they are perfectly entitled and justified to complain about the service not being available.

Visa to devs: Please take contents of our wallet

"PayPal [...] has “laid a path for us to follow""

Oh but of course, which banking company would not like to be able to freeze user accounts without a court order, ignore or refuse to answer questions (or send cookie-cutter answers that answer nothing), add operating expenses at a whim and change the rules (ever more) in their favor when they feel like it ?

Given that the banking industry has now found a method for getting regular government injections without any effective oversight or obligation to put that money down to help the little guys, I understand clearly what that means when they refer to PayPal as a reference.

If banks decide that PayPal is a reference, it is time to go back to stuffing mattresses.

RIAA: Google failing on anti-piracy push

Yup.-, and it's unhappy with the ever-increasing power of the hardware, power that fosters ever more powerful-but-easy-to-use audio and video editing software (some of it free and not all of it bad), and the totally ubiquitous availability of optical burners, not to mention digital players of all kinds.

Heck, in a few more technical generations, you'll probably have a version of Goldwave on smartphones (if we don't already - I haven't checked that).

So yeah, they're unhappy. I understand them, but I can't say I care for them.

Nvidia plans new 'reptile HQ' to match its IT aggressiveness

Congratulations

I have rarely seen a post have so little to do with anything in the article or even in the forum posts.

Looking forward to your next post about baby milk on an article about servers.

We've slashed account hijackings by 99.7% - Google

Spot on

Not to worry though, it's 99.7% of a number nobody knows.

In the best of worlds, it means that they have cut down attacks that they can detect by 99.7%. Those they cannot detect . . .

Business as usual then.

Re: " I doubt they really give a stuff about our privacy"

No reason to doubt. The Great Schmidt declared publicly that we HAVE no privacy, and get over it. So he certainly couldn't care less.

There is no doubt. This is not about privacy (at least not ours, Schmidt's privacy - and that of the Google Board - is something else entirely), this is about CYA and staying away from Facebook-level headlines.

Jerry Yang hired as fly on the wall at Lenovo

Time's up then

If you want a Lenovo laptop, get it now, before this numbnut has had a chance to screw it all up.

Pirate Bay reports pirating anti-piracy group to police

Re: Do you actually know what a shill is?

From Wikipedia :

"A shill, also called a plant or a stooge, is a person who publicly helps a person or organization without disclosing that he has a close relationship with that person or organization.

"Shill" typically refers to someone who purposely gives onlookers the impression that he is an enthusiastic independent customer of a seller (or marketer of ideas) for whom he is secretly working."

As such, the word was used in a perfectly justifiable manner given that definition.

Therefor, I must ask : what exactly is your point ?

Hard Man of Facebook: We might just eat those cheap TLC flash chips

Arrggh! What happened to the Edit function ?

"you'll need techies . . ."

Sorry ?

"you wouldn't need techies swarming all over the data centre replacing broken disk drives from the tens of thousands that would be needed"

No, instead you'll techies swarming all over the data centre replacing used TLC chips.

I don't see the difference.

Brand-new black hole found in supernova remnant

I do not understand why people downvoted the question, it is a perfectly legitimate one for a person who does not have the knowledge of how a star works and how it dies.

I am not an astronomer either, but I have always been interested in how the universe functions and our understanding of it.

Therefor, I can safely say that a star's life is based on two things : the incredibly high pressures (generated by all that mass pushing down on the core) that make thermonuclear fusion possible, and the resultant fusion energy that, in effect, pushes away that mass and prevents gravity from collapsing it all into a black hole.

A star is thus perpetually walking a tightrope between collapsing in on itself and blowing its mass away. Stable stars, such as our Sun, have found a balance. That balance can last billions of years (generally the case for yellow dwarfs, of which our Sun is part), or only a few million (the case of humongously gigantic stars that end up as supernovas), but in the end, it always ends badly, though not always spectacularly.

Our Sun is most likely going to go the red giant path, bloating itself until its volume encompasses the orbit of our very own planet, then, at the very end, go nova by shedding the outer layers, leaving a small dwarf remnant that will radiate for eons upon eons until it just cools down.

A supernova, on the other hand, will not shed its outer layers, it will expel them violently. However, in most cases, the core remains. And, without the mass of the external layers to ensure the necessary pressure that allows for continuous thermonuclear reaction, the intense gravitational attraction of all that mass will win over the diminishing thermonuclear reaction that subsists, and it will collapse upon itself, creating the black hole of legend.

It is, in any case, a truly fascinating subject, and I can only encourage one and all to read up about it on the very many Internet sites that deal with the subject.

Microsoft still reviving Azure SQL Reporting after Monday FAIL

"The issue here is [...] that its taken them over a week to fix it"

And they're still not done fixing it.

Now you can generalize all you want, saying that cloud structures are all at risk etc. etc. You're not inherently wrong, you're just forgetting that Amazon and Google are managing much larger volumes of data and are doing so much more efficiently than Azure is apparently capable of.

Microsoft is building itself a history of failing major products in an embarrassingly public way. Some failures can be explained by market conditions, but this Azure failure is a technical one, and that is a stain that will simply not go away.

We all know how this is going to end. The service will be restored, Microsoft will triumphantly tout the excellence of its platform that lost no data, and the weeks it took to get to that point will be smothered under a pile of pillows. For Microsoft, this will be a success story.

For everyone else, this will be the baseline for Azure reliability : when it fails (and it will), it takes X weeks to get back online. As said in previous comments, Azure is already at a reliability rating of one 9, and that is a failure in any administrator's book.

Facebook in futile attempt to block perverts from Graph Searching for teens

Privacy controls ? How ?

Given that "[Facebook] doesn't request - for example - copies of someone's passport or driving licence", then they can hardly guarantee that Sally Smallperson, 15, is really 15, really named Sally, or is really going to Westborough Baptist Church in Tumbleweed, Colorado, now can they ?

Neither can they be sure that John Doe, 24, is really a truck driver from Arlington, New York.

Frankly, I don't see how anyone on FaceBook can trust anyone else they've never met to be who they say they are. If I had a FaceBook profile, that knowledge would be nagging me constantly.

And yet, there are other web sites out there that mandate a FaceBook ID to login, citing "security purposes". FaceBook can content itself with inexistant security and ID controls, that is Zuckerberg's privilege after all, but I think those other websites had better be prepared for a rough time if ever their logon scheme (trusting a publicly-known, technically untrustable source for login IDs) goes pear-shaped.

Doped nanotubes boost lithium battery power three-fold

Spot on !

I was under the impression that, with all the articles already published on this subject, I was going to be able to find my new suparfast-charging extralong-lasting batteries any time soon.

And now I read they're still in research mode ? Humbug !

Get these things to market already !

P.S. : yeah, I know, easier said than done. But sheesh, one would think that there is enough market pressure on this particular subject to at least hear about upcoming new battery models, not just another lab story.

Official: America now a nation of broadband whingers

Google wants to become an ISP ?

I didn't know that, but it is hardly surprising if you think about it for a second.

Right now, Google has to wait for you to go to its search service and get a query to know what you're up to.

If Google starts serving broadband as ISP, you can bet your children's future that Google will be indexing every single http request coming from your line and thus getting a level of scrutiny of your life that would make the NSA green with envy (that is, until they get a warrant to pilfer that data, which should take around, oh, two seconds in the current US-centric paranoia climate).

So yeah, I can believe Google wants to be an ISP with all its might, and that is not something to laugh at at all.

Big Brother ? Pah ! It had to have cameras to guess at what you were doing. Big Broogle is going to know what your next request is before you do, thanks to statistical analysis and petabytes of data about you, your car, your phone and every place you've been.

All that in the hands of Eric Schmidt - now isn't that a warm, fuzzy thought ?

Oh well, at least disk prices will drop even more once Broogle data centers hoover up all 6TB disks in existence and demand more. Looks like the HDD/SSD industry is going for a boom in a little while.

Hey, they might even finally get holographic storage working at the consumer level.

Boffins make bio-chip breakthrough

I'm thinking more Tleilaxu.

Permafrost melt to boost atmospheric CO₂ faster than thought

Re: scientific ideas that lead from accepting it

Such as Urban Heat Influence ?

Oh, sorry, you were talking about skeptics.

Oh, and concerning forecasts, I do agree that they are based on scientific approach, and they are indeed the best guess we have.

However, it is more and more evident that these forecasts are based on insufficient data and wrong approximations of complex variables, and thus our "best guess" is even more fucked than we are.

Science knows that it does not know all and requires ever more data in order to refine its models and increase the accuracy of its models. Science knows that its models are imperfect, and sometimes uncovers a new element that throws its established thought process into shambles. But Science recovers, takes the hit and comes back, duly noting that its existing model was wrong and a new one need to be established based on the new facts.

It has been said again and again, and it bears repeating just as endlessly as those who think they _know_ the truth : climate science is based on thermodynamics, which is the most complex field of science bar none, and to this day we do not have a model that can reliably predict the behavior of a gaseous mass the size of a country, much less the size of the planet.

The only thing we know for sure is that climate changes, all the time. The last 12,000 years of data we have clearly indicate a global cooling. It is laughable to think that a mere 120 years of recorded data can contradict that tendency, but many people without the slightest grasp of thermodynamics and no more knowledge of climate history seem to think that they are qualified to tell us what is going to happen.

The truth is that we probably will not know for sure before climate historians debate the issue a thousand years from now. By then, they will have a thousand years of data (I'm assuming that the data will not have been fudged by "interested parties" and will be pristine, recorded data only - I may be wrong) and a wee bit of hindsight with which to refine their models.

By then, they might be able to tell us if it will actually rain tomorrow and be right about it (I may be optimistic).

Re: 'this planet is fucked if we carry on like this'

Bollocks.

Planet Earth doesn't give a flying fig if temperatures rise or drop an average of 10 or even 20 degrees Celcius. Earth's biosphere is resistant enough to take the changes in stride. Life will endure, as it can even in the Arctic Circle and in the middle of the harshest deserts.

Humanity, on the other hand, could be quite fucked if we carry on like this, as you say. Obviously, our fragile food base will not survive a 10-degree Celcius average change in one direction or the other, and when our fields are devastated and our livestock decimated, we will shortly follow them into starvation and oblivion.

But please do not extend human hubris to the survival of Life on Earth. There will be innumerable creatures alive to feast on our corpses when we've all ceased to breath, and Planet Earth won't even notice our passing.

Billionaire baron Bill Gates still mourns Vista's stillborn WinFS

Re: no other OS quite like it

Oh come now, Windows Me was certainly Vista's inbred uncle.

Facebook glitch briefly crashes several sites

FB logon for SECURITY reasons ?

For crying out loud, please, let's call it what it is, shall we ? Laziness. That's all it is.

Does Facebook require proof of identity to create an account ? No. Does it require proof of residence ? No. Creating an account with FB just requires an email address, that's all. So the "security" excuse goes flying out the window real fast, accompanied by my contempt for such a lame excuse. This is pure CYA/pass-the-buck marketspeak, perfectly befitting the company name..

You want to rely on some other entity for reasons of security, you create an infrastructure with banks. To open a bank account you have to prove you're you and prove where you live, ergo the bank bloody well knows you're you. From that point, if the bank would certify your online identity, there could be no doubt that you are indeed you.

But that requires a bit more work than a fucking Like button.

OCZ omnishambles leaves flash chippery biz on knife-edge

"OCZ's survival is still possible"

Don't see how. Now that I know that OCZ is on the verge of failure, I am certainly not going to buy a new SSD from them - don't want to take the risk of seeing my guarantee skip town, and I don't think anyone else will either.

This is now a case of watching a company sink and not lifting a finger.

GNOME project picks JavaScript as sole app dev language

So, in other words, this "decision" is pure Web 2.0 rhetoric, ergo I can use the feather they themselves offered and ignore it.

Japan hides anti-piracy warning on P2P networks

A slight correction is required

"Operation Decoy File, which was dreamt up by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in conjunction with RIAA and Madonna (c), will run until the middle of this month."

There, fixed it for you.

Hard drive sales to see double-digit dive this year

"I'll be dancing on the grave of optical drives"

I'm glad you have such simple pleasures in life.

As someone who has seen the birth of this entire industry, I simply prefer the notion of choice. The computer/communications industry is, in my opinion, the most versatile industry on this planet. Today, you can buy almost any kind of form factor (PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone) to do what you want, you can install several different OSes on almost all of them, and you can use tools to access them and manipulate them that no one had dreamed of twenty years ago.

We are chock full of options when it comes to managing our data. We can store it on several different types of supports (magnetic, flash, optical, tape), we can bring it with us in at least three different form factors (optical, USB, external drive), and we can store it remotely to access it anywhere - as long as we have an Internet connection.

I am not for the death of any of these elements. I am pro choice. You like the cloud ? I wish you a stable and reliable connection, and no DRM hassles. I like having my data stored where I can access it and control it. Today, that means either tape or optical (no, I do not use magnetic as long-time storage, sorry, but you can).

The industry is big enough for all these and more. Do not diminish it by removing our ability to choose.

Web smut sites are SAFER than search engines, declares Cisco

Only 5 years ?

It has been since at least 1998 since I have last seen malware on any of my home PCs.

Do I have expensive AV software and firewalls ? No.

Do I seek out and immediately install all updates to all my software ? No.

What have I done then ? Simple :

1) I have set IE as a web browser I only use for specific sites that do not work without it.

2) I use Firefox with Adblock, NoScript, Redirect Remover and Cookie Manager add-ons.

3) I do not use Outlook for my email.

4) I do not install toolbars of any kind, ever.

5) I do not have any IM client of any kind anywhere.

6) I do not use any social sites or even social media of any kind if I can help it.

7) I do not blindly click on every link I get in my mail. Unsolicited crap gets trashed by my whitelist management system, anything else I check and verify before clicking - if I feel that it has a possible relevance to me.

Now, I am a particularly rabid curmudgeon, I agree, but I do believe that the first 4 steps - and the last one - can be easily followed by everyone without trouble. If you do have use for Facebook, Twitter or whatever, it's your call; I'm not criticizing that, just saying I don't use them.

And since malware writers love targeting things that are widely used, not being on Facebook certainly saves me from some measure of risk.

Why did your outsourced IT fall over? Cos you weren't on Twitter

"Social, information, mobile and cloud shouldn't be considered in isolation."

No, they should be be used to carefully construct and precisely explain how exactly this project failed without it being your fault.

Berners-Lee says snoop law could see spies blackmail soldiers

"share more personal data" ??

Are you out of your mind, Sir Berners-Lee ?

Seriously, I think we have just begun to see the misuse of personal data. Never before has there been so much private data available online, and it's already progressing at a rising pace with all the new "social experiments" that declare their existence every other year or so.

Employers are already watching Twitter and Facebook to catch employees cheating on sick days (and stupid enough to post pics of what they did during that time). The way things are going, there will be a lot more abuse before it gets any better - if that is even possible.

So no, I do not agree that we need MORE private data online. We need a LOT LESS of it if we are to once again have a private life that is truly private. But people will have to be bitten en masse before that happens. Like on the day where your insurance calls you and tells you that, since you've posted drunken pics of yourself twelve months in a row, your premium is going up.

Then people might start thinking about it all.

Boeing 787 fleet grounded indefinitely as investigators stumped

"In order to supply enough power, the aircraft depends on its battery packs"

So the Boeing 787 flies on batteries then ?

Somehow I don't find that very reassuring.

Another new asteroid-mining firm: 'First commercial space fleet'

Re: Resource wars??

For the moment, as was stated in the referenced Reg piece, space property is legally non-existant following the UN charter on the subject.

So no, there will be no "claim" to an asteroid by a company, and yes, there will be lasers.

Engineers are cold and dead inside, research shows

Please leave Wo out of this. I'm sure he had nothing to do with your life choices.

SimCity to teach SimMaths and SimScience at school

"what will a SimBoss make of a SimCV?"

Simple, he'll hire and pay in Simoleons.

2013 in storage: Flash, file systems and... Is CDMI actually HAPPENING?

Of course it is happening

There's wayyy too much marketing muscle and bedazzled managers about to not have it happen and, with mobile computing, there is a strong argument for it.

Of course, you also have the all those fingers looking for a new pie (mobile operators, handset vendors, tablet makers, etc).

It's the security aspect of the cloud that intelligent people are worried about, not its usefulness.

And given the amount of importance the security element has had in the evolution of Facebook, I wouldn't bet the farm on the cloud being any more secure than that.

But for the Facebook-sharing mobile tweeters, the cloud will be just peachy.

Boffins create quantum gas with temperature BELOW absolute zero

Re: "do they have other research going on"

Of course they do.

At the Black Mesa facility.

Crowbar mandatory.

Facebook continues to CONQUER THE WORLD

"a very convenient medium for keeping in touch"

Bollocks, my good sir.

The only "very convenient" medium I need is email, and I don't need any "social network" for that.

My real, actual friends have my email and my phone number. The rest I don't need to talk to anyway outside of polite social recognition in public areas.

Facebook is a social network only for those who don't have a network and can't be arsed to make one. Which obviously makes for a LOT of people.

Hey, Apple and Google: Stop trying to wolf the whole mobile pie

"Apple, for example, does hardware exceptionally well"

As brilliantly demonstrated by the iPhone holding fiasco.

And the melting iMac issues, not to mention fading colors once the bright and shiny had worn off and been exposed to sunlight for a while.

We could finally have some objective assessment of Apple as a whole, admitting that the company has had some bright ideas and deserves some recognition, but is far from the perfect idevice-maker that sooo many people insist it is, but I suppose we won't finally bury this stupid Apple reality distortion field any time soon.

Punters rate Apple, Samsung more highly than ever

What is the use of this "survey" ?

Could we stop being subject to useless, baseless factoids please ?

Where companies are concerned, there is only one important fact : market share. All the rest is hoopla and shenanigans.

People "like" HP less ? From what I've read over the past five years, nobody likes HP anymore, yet it is still in the top five and, more importantly, it still has market share.

People think that public image is important. It should be, but is it really ? How exactly ? Which "celebrity" got blackballed from magazines for drug use, or spouse abuse ? Which company got boycotted for slave wages, environmental disasters, or simply disrespecting the consumer ?

Sony is still around, and it has single-handedly found just about every possible way to antagonize and insult its user base (DRM fiascoes one after another, Java on set tops and Blu-Ray . . no, I won't even go there).

The only image that is important is our own, and almost only towards our employers. I've known a few people blackballed in my line of work because of attitude and behavioral mistakes. One or two were a-holes, okay, but none of them spilled millions of gallons of crude in pristine ecological environments, yet they had to move to find a job, whereas BP and all the rest are sitting pretty on billions in profits.

So I'm finding it difficult to grant any sort of importance to this "survey". Feels like paparazzi material to me.

(Disclaimer : I'm not a treehugger or greenie or environutjob in any way, I'd just like to see irresponsible companies actually foot the bill for once)

Big Blue etches silicon nanophotonics with regular chip tech

I went back to re-read the article to make sure, and nowhere is it stated that optical interconnects "do away" with latency and/or bottlenecks.

What the article states is that photons go faster in fibre than electrons do in a wire, therefor optical interconnects are going to minimize latency, not erase them.

And unless quantum entanglement gets even crazier than it is now, you'll always have one absolute physical latency : the distance between RAM and CPU. It cannot go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, after all.

New research cuts Kepler's exoplanet count by one third

Doesn't matter

Even with one-third less planetary candidates, there's still a whole lot more star systems with planets than we previously thought possible.

So, how about getting those star drives ready ? We got places to go now !

Far Cry 3 game review

So you played Far Cry 3 and everything was just peachy ?

Isn't there just one niggling point that annoyed you ? Can it be that so complex a game did not have a single fault worth mentioning ?

Frankly, this review strikes me as way too smooth to be valid. Come on ! Where's the Bite ?

Sorry, but since when is Wikipedia a "definitive proof" of anything ? Wikipedia does not yet hold any academic laurels that I know of.

The only thing you're proving is that there is a user-based truth-by-consensus website out there that agrees with your point of view.

Sacre Bleu! US fingered for Flame attack on Élysée Palace

Personally I think it's a bloody good thing that a country leader not waste his time on a PC - he's got underlings for that sort of thing and he's not got time to waste on Minesweeper.

I expect my President to be spending his time in talks and negotiations with any and everyone that can influence my country, not mucking about with Facebook and a crackable web connection.

Just think of the humongous amount of egg-on-face if a country leader had his PC hacked and data stolen !

I don't think any President could survive that, especially if top-secret strategic data were to be found stolen.