Posts by Pascal Monett

Microsoft goes retail with own shops

Finally

There is finally going to be a brick-and-mortar place where I can go throw a rock in the window when I'm over-exasperated with how Windows works - or doesn't, as may be case.

McKinnon UK trial decision delayed

Actually, for the DoD, it does

Because he made the admins in the US military look like the idiots they are, and for that reason he has to be put away and made to break rocks to atone for the horrible, terrible deed. That is 99% of the damages cited. The rest is just the time it took to slap one of those admins until proper passwords got set.

Barcelona boffin births swarming microrobots

Re:Merely possessing sensors does not make something "aware".

I heartily agree. I see objects shuffling around every day at the office. They have very good sensors (high-tech ones called eyes and ears), but they seem blissfully unaware of anything.

As long as the coffeepot is not empty, that is.

Elevator music files for Chapter 11

Doubletake

So they're gone . . to better serve their customers ?

That must be something like the local Triad gangster changing the "ownership" of his restaurant three times in the last five years - with the same personnel, the same crappy list of dishes, but a different decor each time.

And the Income Tax guys get fooled every time.

Nvidia to power Dark Knight on Vista netbooks

Re:why do I need hi-def movie content on a 10" netbook screen

Get with the progam, mister. You need it because we say so. And when you get wristwatches with 2048x1600 pixels, we'll make sure it has a Blu-Ray drive so you can watch you favorite space opera while getting a cramp in your arm.

Now go and pay your voluntary contribution to the Save The RIAA fund. If you don't know where to go, don't worry, a friendly RIAA SWAT team is waiting just around the corner with a lawyer to "serve" you.

Kids online: Parents need to regulate, says Ofcom

“Laws rarely prevent what they forbid.”

Now that sounds like words of wisdom.

If that is true, though, then why on Earth are legislators so hell-bent on creating new ones ?

Oh, sorry. I had an access of logic there. I'll be all right, I promise.

Jacqui Smith ecstatically ignores more scientific advice

"the long term effects of (insert your poison here) use 'cannot be ruled out'"

Yeah sure. Funny how that argument is totally ignored when it comes to cigarettes, alcohol, guns, Wall Street, genetically-modified organisms and a bunch of other subjects that have been proven to be dangerous in given circumstances.

I am seriously tired of this game of switch-to-the-argument-that-suits-us-best that these politicians play nonstop.

I would like a global policy put in place : choose a line of conduct and STICK TO IT. If you are worried about long-term effects of one thing (as well you should be), then take that perspective into account in ALL other aspects of your mandate.

Politics would be a lot simpler if each subject had a checklist with the same items :

- is it a global issue ?

- is it financially important ?

- is it socially important ?

- is it economically feasible ?

- is it socially acceptable ?

- is it morally acceptable ?

- will there be any short-term benefits ?

- will there be any long-term benefits ?

- what will the short term cost be ?

- what will the long term cost be ?

Go through the list publicly, each time, and validate the answers with experts AND the public.

The day that happens we'll all be one big step closer to democracy.

Squatting spammers take over Facebook protest site

Who gives a toss ?

It's about a group on Facebook. Who cares what it says ? Even the people that are part of it don't go to it anymore.

Microsoft kills off public availability of Windows 7 beta

Funny that

Curious how (supposed) Linux users are all over the comments on Windows articles. One would think they have other things to do with a such a wonderful system than waste time reading articles about an inferior OS.

I'm a Windows user because Linux (any flavor) doesn't suit my needs. Yes, Capito, you read that right : neither Ubuntu nor any other Tux flavor does what I want to do, so I (shock) don't use it.

But you don't see me banging on about Windows in a Linux article. Nor do I see any other comments about Windows in Linux articles.

Oh wait . . there aren't any Linux articles, and Linux is insignificant, market-wise. I wonder if there may be a correlation there.

Kaspersky: no personal information lifted during web hack

One hour is a bit short

I don't know if it's true, and Kaspersky's track record on this issue does not exactly incite me to believe them, but one hour does seem a bit short.

I would think that a proper response time would be at least two working days.

On one hand, leaving such a hole open for more than two days does seem rather slack, but on the other, one hour is surely not enough to evaluate the risk, test its veracity and do something about it.

Big Blue boasts cloud drag-and-drop

"Intelligence Lock Down and Lock Out"

Well now that sounds like SOP for a lot of people to me.

Gates looses mosquitoes on tech conference bloodsuckers

@Alex

Are you aware that all that money is chump change to him ?

Sure he gives a lot, and of course it's a good thing. Never forget, though, that he has reaped a million times what he gives from the gouging he gave the market.

In my view, the only thing he's doing is buying himself some respectability.

Microsoft mojo deflated by Seinfeld Vista ads

@Moderatrix

Proof ?

Playmobile pic, or there is no such thing.

Microsoft search bribery machine refuses to pay up

Oh no !

Microsoft, Ebay and PayPal in the same room. RUN FOR YOUR LIVES !

Talk about a congregation of criminals.

MySpace fingers 90,000 nonces

"monstrously inadequate counter-measures"

And what's your solution, Judge Know-It-All ? Have you ruled that all Internet users must be uniquely identified in a reliable way ? No, because it's impossible to enforce that rule. So you just shove the problem to a website and be done with it. Shoot the messenger, how convenient.

My guess is that you should have ruled that convicted sex offenders should be constrained to either not have Internet access, or submit to a perpetual search order that ensures that anything they do from their home connection is recorded for surveillance issues. But you didn't do that either because it probably violates Human Rights or something. Much easier to put the burden on a website and blame them when they cannot do the impossible.

Epic Fail.

Exploding mobile phone kills Chinese man

@elderlybloke

Why yes, of course. Remember the last thing that went through Lady Di's mind ? That one got out barely 12 hours after her death.

This is the Internet. What on Earth did you expect, decency ?

Kids' sites 'must register moderators'

And the next step is

Banning people who are banned from working with children from banning moderators who are banned from working with children. Let's just cut to the chase and put people banned from working with children in a detainment center so that we're sure they'll never see a child again. Looks like Guantanamo ain't gonna be closing any time soon.

European Parliament wants criminalization of online 'grooming'

Sorry, but the EP is totally right

Adults should not "befriend" children.

Adults have the responsibility of protecting children and educating them, not being friends with them.

It is a sickness of today's society that adults consider having to be friends with children. Becoming a friend is often viewed as facilitating communication. Unfortunately the opposite is true : if the adult becomes a friend, he loses authority and his views become dismissable.

Adults online have absolutely zero reason to try and get the phone or address of a child. I'm going to be totally, shockingly politically incorrect here and say that, outside of family ties, adults should have zero interest in other kids. Beyond polite enquiry to a parent about his health and scholarship status, a normal adult should not devote any more interest in a child that is not part of his family or his best friends' family.

And I'll even go one step further and say that, outside of security or behavioral issues, an adult should not even speak to a child he does not know and that has not been presented to him by someone who he does know that has some family tie with the child.

Of course, online it is sometimes a bit more difficult to find out who you're talking with, but a child will undoubtedly give himself away at some point by using some school expression or other construct that an adult would not use. At that point, an adult should be aware of the situation and behave accordingly in any future correspondence.

Children need to be friends with children, not with adults. Children need to make their own mistakes and understand their own lessons, which is something they cannot do with an adult because, by default, an adult "knows". There is no room for a child to experiment life with someone who already knows about it.

Without going back to the old days when children were considered well behaved if they never opened their mouth and sat still, we need to learn to guide children without either lording over them nor doting on them. Which also implies that we all need to become proper, responsible adults. Maybe that last bit is also part of the problem.

'Infinitesimal magnetic tornadoes' set to ravage computing

Please no

We're already having enough security issues with binary storage and communication. Please do not add a whole new universe of issues to deal with.

Kurdish spyware suspect faces espionage charges

Another extradition request ?

Let me see if this rings any bells : a guy finds his way into a foreign governments' military IT structure, extracts data and sells it off. This obviously has nothing in common with another guy purposely hacking into a foreign governments' military IT structure to find if UFOs exist or not without selling anything to anyone afterwards.

So, if that other guy is supposed to be extradited and brought to trial in said foreign country because of the horrendous damage he did, then this guy might as well hang himself now and be done with it.

No ?

Don’t let Microsoft timescales dictate your Windows migration

This is getting interesting

I am reading more and more about how companies balk at replacing an OS that works for them. And you have to ask : just what gives MS the right to EOL an OS ? Be it XP or Windows 3.11, Microsoft has convinced millions of businesses to put their operating life on the Windows line. And all of a sudden (okay, not so suddenly, but still) they show up and say "Oh, by the way, we're not supporting this version any more. Upgrade or you're screwed".

I may be weird, but it seems to me that if a business says "We're keeping this version, it's your duty to support us", then MS should not have a choice.

I find it curious that a software company can dictate an upgrade cycle worth trillions to millions of business customers. And the failure of Vista is a really tell-tale sign that businesses are wising up to the fact.

An OS is nothing but an enabler for applications to use system resources, end of story. The only reason one should have to upgrade the OS is stay current on hardware improvements, not to get a shiny new UI with a DRM infestation.

In an ideal world, a UI would be an add-on downloaded from the Net, not a core part of the OS. The OS does not need a UI to function, and the existence of a UI should not determine anything else but how the user interacts with the applications at his disposal.

Gosh, I feel like I just described a Unix environment. Must be growing a beard.

What's next for Microsoft's Flight Sim partners?

Never played it much myself

I'm not interested in FS - every version I ever looked at seemed to me to be more sluggish and demanding than the last. I never found any trace of the use of DirectX either - as if the render engine was on CPU mode.

No really, FS is and always has been a turd as far as performance goes.

But whenever I go to a store and check out the game section, I see FS add-ons by the dozens. All kinds, for all tastes, I imagine. That has to mean success, no doubt about it.

And they kill it off, just like that ? Hey Monkey Boy, you're bleeding money with every XBox and Vista is a big gaping hole in your pocketbook, and you kill off something that is bringing in money by the truckload ?

Good Lord, I should be chairman of MS. No way I can screw things up worse than you, Ballmer.

No way.

Gears of War grind to halt

DRM or not

The countdown has started. Gears of War is a time bomb waiting to happen. One day, in five years or in fifty, someone is going to want to run it for old time's sake, and they'll be screwed.

Might as well get used to it people, you never actually buy software anymore, you just rent it. If you're lucky, your lease is for longer than your interest in the game.

Some companies still have enough honor not to saddle you with ticking killers like that. Blizzard, for example, is one company I very much doubt will ever do such a thing. But Blizzard is one of a kind.

I wonder how many of the games I have contain this hidden kill switch that makes my purchase worthless ?

Windows Vista stuck on single digit enterprise adoption

So Vista is dead, long live Vista !

Win7 being Vista under a slightly different disguise, I fail to see how much better its adoption will be in the business market. It will have the same steep hardware requirements, will be just as difficult with existing applications, and will bring nothing practical in exchange. And it comes with DRM Inside. Beurk !

I might very well try Win7 one day. On the spare test PC I have at work. Just for kicks. But at home, my gaming rig will stay XP until it won't run the latest hardware any more. And when that happens, I'll freeze my hardware spending until I find a suitable OS replacement - that does not include DRM.

Get one thing clear, Ballmer : it is MY PC. You have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or cannot do on it, and you have no right to try.

Kaspersky Lab denies panic mongering

@Jayse

Not to be contradictory or anything, but I have the distinct feeling that it's a sight more difficult to get something installed on a phone than it is to get something installed on a PC.

PC's are just begging to have stuff installed, and there are still loopholes that canget stuff installed without even knowing it.

I don't see phones having the same issues - at least, no phone that doesn't have a Windows interface. If it's a Microsoft-driven phone, then sorry, but all bets are off.

Gmail goes offline to avoid flatline online

@Connor Garvey

"Perhaps the author forgot that GMail can be accessed via both POP and IMAP."

Perhaps you could have actually read the article to its end before banging off a comment.

Seagate's complacency blasted away - what now?

Business as usual

Oh, the decisions we made last year were wrong.

So we're going to lay off a bunch of people that didn't have anything to say about our decisions and everything will be all right.

Oh, and we're going to make some more decisions. If we're wrong again, we'll just lay off another bunch of people that have nothing to do with these decisions, and everything will be all right.

Boffin: Lost Stradivarius violin tech reverse-engineered

Why not ?

He may be right about his discovery of Stradivarius's methods, we'll never know. But even if he does bang out hundreds of violins with Strad-level quality, I hardly see how that will impact the value of the originals.

A Stradivarius is still a Stradivarius. A violin maker still needs to know how to choose the wood, how to work it and how to craft the pieces that go into creating a violin capable of being played well enough to elicit wonder in the hearts of listeners. Stradivarius knew how to do that, one of very few.

Making a violin is not following a recipe. Having this information, even if true, is only one element in the myriad of items that a master needs to make a truly exceptional violin.

Boffins monitor strato-weather from half-mile underground

"Sound is made when different layers of air slide over each other"

Uh, that's not how my physics professor explained it to me. Sound is made when a source sets a vibration in the surrounding air - vibration that propagates through collision of particles. There is no air "sliding over", it's molecules smashing into each other that does it.

So, can we have a physics professor to settle this ?

Oz cops cuff Jungle Jane pump-and-dump perv

"It is a real concern that someone like that is out on the street"

I'm sure that the dolls will rest easy now.

Europe PC sales sagged in 2008

Growth and Profit

It is profit that ups the share value for the stockholders.

It is growth that ensures that the profits will still keep rolling in the year after.

Because the capitalist economy matra is "grow or die".

Stagnation is not acceptable because while you stagnate, a competitor is growing. So either you grow, or your competitor does - and if he grows, he steals market share from you and your profits will shrink.

Both notions are thus closely related - until the day people will accept that they do not need "more" market share and the competition doesn't try to stomp they out with extreme prejudice.

The words "share and share alike" are totally unknown in our economy.

Where has all the bad storage gone?

Almost funny

Except that, as noted, this article is not about storage, but about backup tools.

What I find hilarious is that the author had trouble creating CD backups. Come on, Nero was good enough and all you needed was to create your disk image and burn it. Not that hard.

But of course, I understand that it is much less sexy than the Call Of Jobs' Software, so you had to find an excuse to use it, and you end up accusing CD burning. Fair enough. And I do agree that a single-core Windows platform had best be left alone when burning an optical disk. Fortunately, multi-core has since come to the market.

Unfortunately, when it comes to backup, I don't care about sexy, I want efficient. And creating/burning a DVD image is efficient enough for me.

Brit forces get hoverstare ducted-fan droid

Battlefield 2142

That little hover thingy almost looks like it was copied from the game.

Does that mean they have a capsule-launching APV in the works ? Not to mention plasma rifles.

Ooh, is war going to become cool again ?

<shuddering at what I just said>

Prisoner star Patrick McGoohan dies at 80

Angry Scots

I sympathize as well. I was subjugated by the series, and the last episode was a serious let-down. But it will never diminish the value of the rest of the series.

I salute you, Sir 6.

Blade server systems - back to the old school?

@The Cube

You make some interesting points that I found quite valid - save for one :

"the IT equipment life cycle is shortening"

Now, I don't have any data on the subject, but intuitively I'd think that, in these times of crisis, companies would have a tendency of keeping their existing kit instead of buying even more new stuff.

After all, the failure on Vista in the corporate market, where its uptake was far less than anticipated by Microsoft, is a telling sign.

Have any figures you'd care to share ?

First case of sleep emailing documented

RE: RE: old news

Yes, and while we're at it, let us forbid any repetition of any news article that has already appeared somewhere.

If it was reported in the Absarokee Chronicles, well that's it, it's been said once, no use repeating it.

From now on, all news outlets should be required to check if any other news outlet has already posted said tidbit. Only if the search comes up empty can the news outlet publish it.

Of course, this will require a central, worldwide database that records every single article.

I suggest we base that database in a UK government IT project, thus its integrity, coherence and functionality will be ensured.

Once that is done, we can all just go read the database instead of bothering with local copies that are carbon-unfriendly and wasteful of paper.

Now go wash your hands before eating your dinner.

US woman says Ubuntu can't access internet

Linux isn't that hard

But it's still hard enough for a good share of the population to not find their way around it.

Now that we are hopefully done with tearing the remains of the victim to shreds and pounding said shreds below ground, might we reflect on the true portent of the article ?

Perhaps, just maybe, there might be a slight percentage of chance that Linux aficionados (ie geeks) are much too accustomed to their brainchild to actually spot the hurdles the non-initiated (ie lusers) need to overcome ? And if said non-initiated is also not computer proficient, said hurdles can seem like mountains, apparently.

"Pretty much everything just works" - except when it doesn't. And whether or not the victim was brain-dead, a moron, or just clueless (still not a crime), it does seem difficult to apply for help online if no online connection is available.

I think this story should be a lesson to all would-be users of any flavor of Linux : try if you will, but for Pete's sake don't tell anybody unless you succeed. Because if you fail, not only will you have wasted your time (at best), but you will also be keelhauled by all those Linux geeks who cannot bear the thought that their beloved Penguin is not the most friendly, cuddly, easy-to-use perfect product in the Universe.

In the end, when you don't have a clue and you're on your own, Linux is not your friend.

But neither is Windows, for that matter. I suspect other OSes have the same issue, but I haven't tried any other, so I won't jump to conclusions.

Kids more likely to be bullied than pestered online

When today's teenagers make up the majority of voting parents

Dear God I hope I'm rich on a secluded island by that time !

InPhase might ship holographic storage this year?

20 MB/s ? Is that all ?

When I read the PR fluff, it boasted about how millions of bits could be written in a single flash of light.

Me dumb. If you can write them that fast, then surely you can read them that fast. I'm stupid like that.

So then I check out the transfer rates of today's media. For CDs, it maxes out a bit below 8 MB/s. DVD if way over that, at a max of over 21 MB/s. Blu-Ray boasts of 36 to 48 MB/s.

So, with existing snail pace technology, we are already in view of 50 MB/s, and this newfangled high-tech toy states a measly 20 MB/s ?? For a tech that is supposed to read and write "millions of bits in a single flash" ?

Did they put a speed bump in the reader so that it would remain compatible with today's IDE interface, or what ?

Bad start, boys. Your toy should be boasting 1GB/s rates or it doesn't seem serious.

Tech industry still leaving dirty great footprints, says Greenpeace

Unique innovation ?

What, innovation is no longer enough now ? It has to be unique innovation ?

I gather that Greenpeace has bitten the corporate speak bullet, where the meaning of the word has been beaten to a pulp by adding it willy-nilly to just about every PR puff piece made in the last ten years.

So now innovation has to be unique to be meaningful. How long until Microsoft "embraces" the new definition and "expands" its meaning the next time it moves a button around in the UI ?

After all, the true meaning of "innovation" has been just about extinguished, hasn't it ?

Wikipedia exceeds $6m donation goal

"withstood the forces of corruption and special interests so well"

If you really think that I must conclude that you have no idea what is actually going on in the Land of Truth By Consensus.

The only articles that are relatively intact are the ones concerning science and boring stuff that the moronic super-editors are not interested in or do not have the knowledge to fudge almost imperceptibly. Anything else is good for target practice from the endless horde of special-interest groups, of which the super-editors themselves are part.

The definition of corrupt is when the people with authority use their authority based on personal bias rather than defined and accepted rules. If the super-editors actually followed their own rules, one could argue your point, but the fact is that they don't (well, a portion of them in any case).

Therefor WhackyLand is most definitely corrupt.

MoD tops lost security pass league

@Paul : easyer

Congratulations on your creative spelling attempt - you've won the originality contest !

Russian's emoticon trade mark won't wash with EU

Then they were two

So now the Patent Office of Russia is using the same guideline as the Patent Office in the USA ?

Somebody call a virologist, there's a worldwide outbreak of incompetence in public office.

Leeds Council loses kids details

advice on using memory sticks

Company-wide policy at the OS level forbidding USB to work, plain and simple.

True security is not leaving any leeway for mistakes to happen.

Green Hills spins out military Integrity for masses

"The military has always had better security than we can get on our computers"

Pity they've never actually used it.

Supersonic fighters could snuff out hurricanes

Energy, turbulence and all that

I don't give this "patent" a snowball's chance in Hell of ever amounting to anything.

First of all, turbulence in storm clouds is something that actual pilots avoid like the plague. Why ? Because it's dangerous at any speed.

Granted, a hurricane is a rotational system which could be more coherent than a basic storm cumulonimbus, but on the other hand its coherency is its most dangerous attribute.

Even if one does believe that a supersonic fighter plane can fly reliably in hurricane conditions - which I doubt (not built for that) - the sonic boom that can occur will be a drop in the ocean of energy that is surrounding the plane already.

I highly suspect that the so-called "scientists" that have applied for this patent haven't the slightest notion of the amount of energy that exists in the most turbulent nature of a hurricane's eye. The simple idea of "disrupting" this raging chaos is laughable.

For me, the only way to snuff out a hurricane would be the application of a comparable amount of energy in a negative manner.

The total kinetic energy of a hurricane is apparently rated at 1.5 x 10^12 Watts (source : http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html). The strongest ever sonic boom on record is rated at 144 pounds per square foot. Regular booms these days are rated at around 20 pounds per sq. foot.

A hurricane, like Katrina, "strong and very pronounced rotary circulation, closed isobars, a pressure of 17 or more pounds per square foot and winds of 74 miles per hour (64 knots) and higher. The devastating class 5 hurricane exceeds wind speed of 156 miles per hour." (source http://www.webcoast.com/environment/hurricanes.htm).

So one might think that 20 ppsf beats 17 ppsf, but one must also take into account that a sonic boom happens in an instant and disappears, whereas the 17 ppsf of a hurricane is a constant.

If you think that a sonic boom can do a hurricane in, then realize that the Hiroshima bomb was rated at 8600 ppsf.

And that was a measly 15 kilotons. Today, we have megaton bombs.

I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way.

Peaches Geldof - she's back!

Born in 1989

So call me when she's actually learned something in life.

If she's lucky, that'll be around 2029.

RISC daddy conjures Moore's Lawless parallel universe

No end to progress in sight

And until the virtual environment of my games is real-world realistic, there will be no end.

As a gamer, I would expect to be able to drive through the side of a house with my tank, but there are precious few games that allow for it, and when they do, it's in a special environment.

I would expect to be able to knock trees over with my tank, but in most games not only does the tree stop me on the spot, it also actually assigns damage to the tank if I try.

I would expect a nice crater to mark the spot where a bomb fell, but there are hardly any games that do that. I would also fully expect the village, and possibly the entire map, to be totally devastated by the time the level ends, but there aren't ANY games that do that at the moment.

In most games, anything that is not a movable game object is, for all practical purposes, indestructible. Walls are impenetrable, roofs never get blown in, trees are there for all eternity. They are, structurally speaking, just as permanent as the ground.

Changing that is going to take humongous amounts of processing power, and probably lots more RAM than the average PC has today, as well as probably a totally new approach to modeling the virtual world.

And when we do have a realistically destructible environment in games, just think of what we will be able to do as far as science and technology are concerned !

So we really do need to get there, and if a 64-core parallel processing environment is what it takes, then bring it on !

Google to jettison 'second class citizens'

10,000 temps ?

For Heaven's sake, how can a company possibly justify using 30% of its workforce on a temporary basis ?

On the other hand, Google is obviously not at pains to pay them, so why not waste some cash like that ? It's deductible, after all.

Facebook spams social networkers with phishy email

Wow. Just wow.

I've made some crazy mistakes in my time, but this one really takes the cake.

Well, at least now it's official : Facebook has absolutely no credibility anymore. From foisting unwanted apps to sending official spam mail, Facebook is now a haven for hardened criminals and their future victims.

If you're in it, get out of it while you can.