Posts by Pascal Monett 19253 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Of course he does, an opportunity to pump up the stock price, get his payout, and sell higher than he bought.
That's what he's doing, nothing more, nothing less. He doesn't believe in Apple - if he did he'd have bought stock in it decades ago. I can't say he didn't, but the billion he just plunked on the table does not mean he believes in the company, it means he's lining himself up for more.
Because that is what he does and everyone knows it.
What I don't get is why that kind of person gets press time. Who cares what he says ? He's lying anyway.
The headline should have been "Notorious corporate raider lining up Apple as next victim".
I see all these posts about how DARPA is going to use any of this new tech to better get the squeeze on our privacy, and I understand very well where that is coming from and I blame nobody.
But let's take a step back just one second.
Look at cryptography. I've always heard that a secure cryptographic system is a system where everyone knows exactly how it works, because knowing how it works does not mean you can break it.
So, if we apply that rule to data anonymisation, I think we could very well design something where data is effectively anonymous and could not be recombined to something that would break anonymity.
I don't think it will be easy though.
My kid doesn't use Facebook because I have taught her the fallacy of such "connections".
As a kid, if you have a friend, then you TALK to that person, you don't type words into a computer. Because, as a kid, the only friends you have are RIGHT WITH YOU, EVERY DAY, in the biggest social connection tool since the dawn of Mankind - school.
Once you have grown up and become a teenager, the rules do tend to change. There are some old friends that have moved, and you use the Internet therefor can make contact with interesting people you will probably never see face-to-face. At that time, one can start using social sites cautiously, but tools like NSA Messenger (aka Skype) will be much more profitable to stay in contact.
The thing is just to always remember : whatever you put on the Internet will ALWAYS remain available. So don't put anything you'd rather not be remembered of (or have anyone else find out) in twenty years.
Yeah, that's the hard part.
So, you encrypt your mail, print it on paper, have to go deliver it yourself to be secure, BUT you send the instructions to the secret via email, in clear. Or, you encrypt the instructions and . . . print them on a printer and get another set of instructions in clear.
In other words, you're in a crowded public area, handing a conspicuous brown envelope to some highly-visible person, loudly saying "TOMORROW'S PASSWORD IS . . . ".
Hmm. Somehow I think PGP is a better idea.
And if you really want secure, just go see the person face-to-face.
I do not think that discussing technical details is the solution - it acknowledges that the State has the right to snoop and tries working around that.
Instead, walk right up to your representatives and put your foot down concerning your right to privacy.
What is the excuse for all this snooping ? The modern boogey man : terrorism. Yes, 9/11 was horrible. Yes, it should never happen again. But it is the fact that known terrorists were not signalled to proper police forces that allowed them to act. Snooping is not the solution, and would not have helped.
So go to Congress and tear down RIPA and the so-called PATRIOT act. They are unconstitutional and therefor illegal, and it is high time that all this terrorism malarkey be put back where it belongs.
If you live in constant fear of terrorism, then you have given the terrorists the victory they wanted in the first place.
So this guy was caught because his GPS was tracked with spyware, right ?
So, the NSA had nothing to do with it then, right ?
So, if the NSA is useless in catching this clearly dangerous type of criminal, and it served jack shit in capturing Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, then what on God's green Earth is all this "surveillance" good for ?
Catching Pirate Bay users ?
I mean come on, now is the time to tell us that the NSA can actually have a use for good. This would be the perfect opportunity to brush off some complaints and say "See ? We got this bastard because WE WERE LISTENING IN ON HIM ! Trust us now ?".
I still wouldn't trust them, but I'll be damned if this wasn't the perfect time to polish the image.
How can they possibly know that the original object got whacked between 20 and 40 thousand years ago ?
I'm curious. These objects are in space, and we haven't gotten near them. The one object that we did get near to got scorched by reentry. Is there enough data left to determine that interval in a single, earth-atmosphere-burned chunk of space rock ?
That seems like a pretty real problem to me.
That said, you are right on one point : the real problem is indeed not that the US gov is spying on everyone, it is that it is spying on everyone behind secret courts and gagging orders instead of doing so within the blinding light of democracy and justice, with oversight and due process every step of the way.
Which means that the US has just placed the final nail in the coffin that was built the day a previous US President openly stated that the Geneva Convention did not concern the US government when it came to retribution against people suspected of terrorism.
Today the US of A has removed itself from its lofty position as beacon of Freedom and Justice, and has placed itself at the same as a certain Cuban dictator, or any tinpot South American leader for that manner.
The only difference is that I still believe that Americans can reestablish actual Justice and Liberty for all within their own country. It will, however, involve quite a lot of pulling fingers out of arses.
I'd be interested to know exactly how they define "uptime,"
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Easy, the operator turns around and checks that the green light is flashing for disk activity. If it is, everything is A-OK.
What was that you said ? You still can't connect to your storage space ? Have you tried rebooting the Internet ?
"whether they used any filtering mechanism to determine what, if anything, the respondents knew about fracking before being surveyed"
They used to do that, but they got tired of always getting "nothing" as response and figured that it won't change any time soon, so they stopped checking.
The day Joe Public actually knows something on the subject he's been quizzed about it will snow in Hell. And we'll have better politicians.
Saying that your data is protected, but it could be more protected, is stupid.
It implies that the initial level of protection may not be enough, although they have marketed it as sufficient.
It also creates client tiers, with some having better protection than others.
I fear it can only end in tears.
So, write head larger than read head, overwrite by reading adjacent area and writing both, domino effect for the width of the band . . .
ouch.
If they can actually get this tech to work with the same data bandwidth and response times that we enjoy on today's disks, in read and write modes, then I will be suitably impressed.
But it is still starting to look like there's a whole barrel of monkeys behind every disk write, and when you introduce more complexity you unavoidably introduce more points of failure.
I won't be totally stupid and say something like "they should reduce the size of the write head" - if they could they most probably would have. But still, it doesn't look too good from the MTBF point of view.
Wait and see, I guess. But I'll be approaching those drives warily.
No, they're not. That is a fad that is already starting to fade because
1) people are annoyed by the surcharge
2) people get headaches
3) people are wisening up to the fact that today's 3D is just glitter, bringing nothing to the plot
Historically speaking, we first had black & white films without sound. They were perfectly capable of telling a story. We added sound to the black and white films, and were capable of telling better stories. We then added color to the films, and the stories we told became more natural.
At no point did anyone point at the screen and laugh and say "it's all 2D !". Nobody cared. Immersion was sufficient.
Now the media industry is desperately trying to add 3D and make people believe that it is important, indeed, revolutionary. Except 3D does nothing to improve the telling of a story. On the contrary, it clashes with immersion, and most often jarringly brings home the fact that you are watching a film.
There may be a time coming when some genius filmmaker will find a way to make 3D relevant to the story - miracles can happen. At this point in time, all 3D is used for is the same trick as the very first black & white film that showed people a train coming head-on - and people fled from the theater.
That trick is old now, and people are getting tired of it already. I cannot count the times I've already heard friends and acquaintances talking about the latest film they saw in 3D and mentioning that the 3D was annoying more than anything else. I've had some friends state that they will no longer go to a 3D viewing at all. I know I won't.
So no, 3D is NOT on its way to becoming a standard.
Not by a long shot.
I don't see why this could be useful in any way. We already have small projectors that are quite bright enough, not too expensive, and easy to connect to laptops and, probably, tablets.
Given that the market is not in terrible need of image projecting technology, I don't see that this will change the market in any particular way.
Image capture was a totally different ball game. Having a camera in every phone has indeed been a good thing, if only to prove that UFOs and Bigfoot do not actually exist. But image projection ? Somehow I don't see that work that well.
After all, if you're projecting an image, you generally want to show your friends - who, these days, are on Facebook, so not there, so no use projecting.
They can also be used to honestly download Windows patches, hotfixes for games legally acquired, and Linux distributions.
Why the fuck does every anti-piracy maniac have to reduce the Internet to only piracy ?
Don't you know that it is PORN that makes the world go round ?
I think that, nowadays, our notion of orbital physics in our own solar system is pretty accurate. If there was a Jupiter-sized mass outside of the orbit of Neptune, it would most likely mess up the calculations for Neptune and Uranus, and even more for Pluto and Charon, and those anomalies would have been detected for what they are by the scientific community.
Therefor, I think that we can safely say that, if there is a planet of jovian-level mass outside the heliosphere of our system, it is so far away as to be nearly undetectable. That could mean that, if present, it might not even be orbiting our Sun.
But I don't think there is.
Don't forget that Jupiter is the king of all planets, none are bigger. Jupiter is 317 times the mass of our Earth, that is VERY massive. If there was another Jupiter lying around, we'd have detected it.
Probably because not everyone knows what "au" means.
In addition, it is often good to give a comparison, so even if the people who don't know what "au" means will most likely have no idea of how far our Earth is from the Sun in the first place, they will still come out with the impression that they learned something.
Yes, and I should now have the power to decide what runs on my machine and what doesn't.
I should be able to block JavaScript until I decide that I wish it to run. Telling me that there are more and more sites that use it is not an excuse. It should still be in my power to decide.
There are sites that are entirely made of Flash animations - I can still decide whether or not I want to see them. If I don't, I am aware that I will not access any site content. My choice.
It's about choice.
that this is the true beginning of the end of Microsoft Office.
Twenty years from now, we just might be looking at MS Office the same way we look at WordPerfect today.
And everyone will use LibreOffice, because Microsoft will have thoroughly disgusted users from its own product with its abusive license techniques.
Oh sure, there will be the Fortune 1000 companies that will do everything with MS products as they always have done. But everyone else will just use the tools that they need and not purchase a gigantic toolbox they don't need.
Of course, I am probably wrong, but I'm convinced MS is not making its life easier with this scheme. You can't beat free for price, and if its good enough for your needs, it will do. LibreOffice is good enough for personal use, and more and more people are starting to realize it. If MS loses the individual demographic, the professional one will follow sooner or later. MS knows that, they did it in reverse (and still do, with their ultra-low-price student licences).
As said above, it is hardly surprising that a datamining CEO would trumpet the utter indispensability of his company's tools. Fine, it's a good PR piece.
But let's look at the reality of things, hmm ?
"Unstructured data must also be thought of in its textual form of Word documents, emails, social media messages and other as yet undefined data shapes." - sorry, social media has a noise to data ratio that is far too important to make any sort of data mining useless. Yes, you will probably find tweets that say your company is good, and others saying the reverse. You will never be able to map that to a customer having bought something from you unless said customer specifically signs up on your site to tell you that his Twitter account is FancyPants35748 and his credit card name is Jonathan Smith. Sure, some twits will tell you, but most will probably be a bit reluctant to acknowledge that their online persona is GorgeousJunk69.
Just a few paragraphs later, the article quotes "The fact is that context will always rank as ace high".
So let's just write off social media now. You'll never get the context in a 160-char tweet.
Next point : “Those who are still relying on human interpretation will be trying to stay afloat on the unstructured data tsunami with one hand tied behind their back,” dixit Andrew Anderson, CEO of Celaton. What is he saying ? Humans cannot be trusted to manage data in a timely fashion and we must hand over our analysis procedures to computers.
Yeah, sure. Because we know how to teach computers to distinguish between "programmer" and "Oracle developer" and "business analyst". Yeah, let's hand it over to computers, that'll work a lot better. Just like it works fine in Australia, for processing payments. Tell me, if we can still find major companies capable of botching up a comparatively simple job of paying salaries, how can we expect to be able to get relevant information from a tsunami of unstructured data ?
“Having a system in place that can understand a candidate’s CV without the need for human intervention is crucial." Indeed. Too bad we don't have a reliable system that can do that automatically without human intervention.
"correlating point-of-sale transactions with social feeds can provide great insight into how a consumer felt about the company and the product" - yes, except you don't know that that is indeed a consumer of your product, and not some hacker or troll pulling your data leg.
"This estimates that the digital universe of western Europe will grow from 538 exabytes to 5.0 zettabytes between 2012 and 2020" - yup, and 99% of that will be of absolutely no interest to anyone after a week.
"We know that a huge amount of unstructured data is spam" - finally something I can agree with. And you want me to waste my time and money building a system that is going to analyse my spam mail to tell me I'm getting spam ? Get lost.
The reality of data analysis is sort your data first. The bigger the volume of data, the more stringent your data retention criteria must be. The only data worth analysing is the data relevant to your company, the rest is a waste of resources. This article tries to make me believe that I must become the NSA and gather as much data as I can to hoard it and endlessly analyse it. I say bullshit. Recovering every tweet where my company is named is not going to actually give me a proper image of my company. Looking at my sales figures will.
You sound like you have a job in management. Maybe at CSC.
Let me ask you one question : if you needed a heart transplant, what would you rather hear ;
"Don't worry sir, we have the most experienced surgeon in the country waiting for you, he's done six thousand operations just like yours, you'll be fine. Of course, your insurance is going to pay a hefty sum, but good health is priceless, is it not ?"
or
"Don't worry about your insurance premiums sir, we have a new surgeon fresh in from Tzeckoslowhateveria. He used to be a programmer but he passed an online certification and now he's itching to get some experience for only £1/hour. Of course, we'll need you to sign this waiver..."
Well CSC is going for option #2, do you know why ? Because the people who make the decision will be up & out as soon as they've cashed their bonus checks and won't have to deal with the fallout.
Now you tell me just how that is rational.
Or rather, don't bother. You are part of those who believe that money is the only criteria, so obviously you cannot understand just how wrong you are. Until the day comes when YOU are made redundant, of course. That day it'll be a whole other story, I'm sure.
Let's say it's not.
Climate change, on the other hand, is.
Whether it is warming or cooling is something that we simply do not have either the experience or the knowledge to determine at this point in time.
It is the refusal of that last fact that gives room for lunatics on either side of the fence to rock the boat, so to speak.
But they ARE doing their jobs. Make no mistake, your Senator is well aware of this program and has no intent of stopping it.
Oh, sorry, you thought they were there to represent YOUR rights ? That is soo last century.
Get with the program ! This is Government 2.0 ! The Constitution is a PR tool to make you feel good, it's not something that is supposed to hamstring WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE.
Now be a good drone and go work for your retirement. Oh, and this time, tie your shoelaces correctly. Your laces were really shabby yesterday, you want the surveillance footage to prove it ? I could show it to you, but then I'd have to shoot you.
