Posts by Pascal Monett 19442 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Not at all, my good Mr. You-Have-No-Privacy-Get-Over-It Schmit. Oh, you thought we'd forgotten that ? We never will.
We're not "concerned" that you are "somehow" going to misuse the data. We are CERTAIN you are going to index that data seven ways to Sunday and sic your advertisers on us with it.
Difference.
Steam games often have a demo version.
Not always, I agree, but often.
Personally, I use and abuse of their Wishlist functionality. Games are often sold at lower prices a few months after the initial launch. I can wait a bit, helps me find out from first-day buyers if the game is interesting before I put my money on it.
Then there are the titles I don't feel like waiting for and just buy & try as soon as the download is finished. No need to go to a store, where PC games aisles have all but disappeared.
I think Steam is doing a damned good job of keeping the games industry alive, what with their indie section, multi-platform coding and their "comprehensive" approach to DRM.
I've come to the point where, if a game is not on Steam, I practically don't buy it. There are a few exceptions, but they are exceptions.
I can understand your argument, and I give you an upvote for the basic truth you expose. Of course, if you are happy with a touchscreen, more power to you. After all, a touchscreen is still a screen.
The difference - in my mind - is that I don't mind if the touchscreen on my phone is smudged - I don't look at it all that often. And when it does have smudges, my phone is easy to clean and it's quickly done.
Contrast that with the widescreen I have for my PC, which I stare at for hours at a time, and is placed on the other side of my desk (ie hard to get to because desk against the wall so no going around). Smudges on that screen bring immediate irritation to me because a) they're a constant nuisance while I'm working and b) I'm going to have almost lie on the desk to clean the whole screen for that darn smudge so as not to leave traces on the rest of it.
There are people who are not bothered by screen smudges. Good for them. I'm not one of those. I like my screens spotless. And touchscreens simply cannot be spotless. Ergo, I'd go mad working with one if I couldn't avoid touching it.
What for ?
Do they really think I want to do my coding by poking at my screen ?
On a PC I have a mouse and a keyboard that fulfill 100% of my computing needs. Requiring that I actually touch the screen is not only superfluous but also a waste of time, not to mention a possible health risk, what with the possible hazards to the back. Keeping a proper ergonomic stance all day long is difficult enough without having to bend over the keyboard to poke at some vertical surface.
A touchscreen is only useful when you don't have a keyboard. It becomes necessary if you have neither keyboard nor mouse. If you have both, it is nothing more than a waste of money.
Great idea, Paypal. That way, the miscreants will have just one site to hack to steal personal data on everyone and gain access to absolutely all banking data there is. If ever that site came to exist, it would require ironclad security of the likes we have not yet seen and would probably not be able to implement properly. Hopefully they would at least salt their hashes ?
Uh, Paypal, between your arbitrary account locking based on "suspicions" that you never justify, your inexistant customer support and now this idea, I'm starting to wonder whose side you're on - ours, or the criminals ?
Funny how all those people using that argument against the Ribbon have never found out that you can minimize it to show only tab names and still work with it - since when you mouse over a tab name the Ribbon shows that tabs' content.
I am not a Ribbon fanatic, but I do have to use 2010 like practically all business users (I'd rather stick with Office 2000 - it has more than I need already). It rather galls me that people stay fixated on this non-issue of Ribbon size instead of bashing stuff that really needs bashing.
. . . that all these IPCC "experts" don't know how to write a document.
Really ? And these people are supposed to be experts ? I thought experts in their field were recognized because of the mass of papers that they had published. So writing a report shouldn't be that much of an issue for them, should it ? And if we're talking about some internal policy or another, how long can it take these supposedly intelligent people to learn ? How about an afternoon of training, instead of wasting judges' time and taxpayer money ?
Oh, sorry, I forgot : actually doing something useful is not the goal here.
You make it sound like an annual fair or something.
And you forget to mention that the Gendarmerie (whose members are counted among the nations armed forces - just like the army) has offices all over national territory as well.
C'est bon, on avoue : nous sommes bien une dictature !
Ah, the magic of the Cloud (tm).
As if there wasn't an army of coders hammering away at the code in order for some admin drone to be able to "flip the switch".
And we've seen some pretty ugly results already when the "magic" of the Cloud meets the grim reality of load balancing and other server-side issues (hey Microsoft, any word on Azure clients' web site restore ?).
Let's keep our feet on the ground, shall we ? It may be "someone else's data center", but that in no way changes anything about the number of coders involved nor does it diminish in any way the dangers of rolling out an update or a new functionality.
The BIG difference is that, when it goes down (and it does), you will have no control over when it comes back up nor what state it will be in (eh, Azure users ?).
THAT is the reality of the Cloud.
Yeah, hang on. All those Wikipedia references and you still missed how Ian Fleming was part of Churchill's "Ungentlemanly Warfare Group" ?
And you fail to reference this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming ?
Not to mention this : http://www.cracked.com/article/152_5-authors-more-badass-than-badass-character-they-created/ ?
Really, one might think that you have some sort of bias.
And those who do ensure that their equipment has been hardened against attack are certainly not in the group of vendors who will be considered for procurement, due to the fact that their products are more expensive than those of vendors who do not insure against attacks.
In other words, yeah, smartmeters are dumb, open and unprotected. What a surprise. Security is always a cost, and these "smart" meters were not conceived with security in mind, but with remotely controlling the availability of power on a site (house, appartment, restaurant, industry, . . .).
You get what you pay for.
Since when is that supposed to be an issue ? Sure, it'll work the first day or two, if the company was stupid enough to use a WiFi router for all its networking needs, but somebody's bound to notice that the jamming starts when a given van is parked not far away and when they do, the cops will be bringing down that attack venue pretty quick.
Internet vulnerabilities are dangerous because they are (almost) anonymous, overwhelming, are hard to block when they start and can come from any point in the world, which (in most cases) immunizes the attacker from judicial oversight. So it's easy, carries almost no risk and requires next to no physical effort.
RF jamming needs physical proximity to the target, which then forces the attacker to contend with real-life covert activity requirements. Not to mention that a van has somewhat more complicated temperature-control issues, and an idling vehicle staying in place for hours at a time is going to garner attention.
I file that the Unlikely Attack Venue folder. Especially since a simple Ethernet cable is all it takes to thwart the attack completely.
It's good to see that scientists are still working to improve our comprehension of the Real World (tm) and thus our models of it.
The dogs bark, the caravan of science passes.
Climate is difficult, based on thermodynamics which is a very difficult subject. Anything that forwards our knowledge in the subject is good to take, regardless of the changes in our conclusions it can bring. We need to finally understand how our climate works sooner rather than later, in order to shut up the zealots (on both sides) and get on with doing what is really necessary.
And he's whinging because it failed ?
Well duh.
Here's a counterpoint : it's called Minecraft. That game is all over the place. The graphics are horrible, blocky abominations. The principle is, as far as I can tell, just digging and building stuff. The maker of the game has declared to never, ever include any sort of DRM or protection in it. Minecraft can be bought for 20 bucks, or torrented six ways to Sunday.
The guy (oh, yeah, forgot to add : the ONE guy) who made Minecraft is a millionaire. Hundreds of thousands of people have shelled out for his game. He's so rich he sold his game to a company because he (probably) got tired of the concept of working.
So how does that situate your product ? Firmly in the pile of shit, I'd say. A good game sells, with or without protection.
So go take your righteousness and sit on it. Prick.
Remember the good ol' days when 14" laptops weighed in at 15kg ? And it took eons to get them started, not to mention they crawled along like asthmatic slugs ?
You remember those days, don't you ? And if you do, you do realize that you're complaining about 17" laptops that weigh only 3kg ?
Pff. Never happy, are we ?
"[This year] remains a transition year" - yeah, you're transitioning into loss.
"This reflects the challenging environment on the web " - yeah, people are still not dumb enough to pay you real money for your cloning efforts ; what a shame.
"We’re excited about the entire category of the social casino" - man, there are SO many people yet to con ! And so many ways to con them !
"regulatory obstacles that we can't predict or control" - whassatyousay ? gambling is illegal in most states ? Chucks ! Now what do we do ?
Earth's atmosphere today has nothing to do with its content a few hundred million years ago.
The reason that changed was not any Gaia-induced "balance" mode, it was the evolution of algae, then plant life that reconfigured the levels of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen (in my simplified, unscientific understanding of the matter).
If there was supposed to be a "balance", then we'd be gasping in an atmosphere with only 10% of today's oxygen.
I sincerely hope you do, but I don't think you will.
My original, holographed XP Windows cannot install on today's hardware, it refuses to complete the install process and blue screens every time I try.
If I do want to install on modern hardware, I need an XP SP2 image. That will probably last a few more years, at which point only an XP SP3 image will be able to install on hardware after, say, 2020, for a few more years.
So I'm guessing that, after 2025, you will be forced to install something else whether you like it or not.
Of course, you should probably be able to get XP running in a VM far longer than that - but users don't have to stay in a VM, now do they ?
That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, whatever OS is used.
Running a business-critical app without proper backups and support . . . no, I can't believe it can be done by any sane organization.
Sorry, does not compute here.
It's not only that the Internet let's anyone insult anyone else, it's much more the fact that the Internet is millions upon millions of anyone insulting anyone else.
It's purely a problem of scale.
Libel laws were effective up to the first http connection because before that, the only guy to slander you was a neighbor or someone in your rather immediate surroundings. And you would drag him to court over it because the slandering happened in your surroundings.
Now, your immediate surroundings has been artificially expanded to include countless faceless people you don't know, don't know you and will never meet you, but have no fear of commenting on what they read on Twitter or wherever. And since they have the understanding of a goldfish, their reactions are knee-jerk level at best. Unfortunately, their attention span is longer than that of the goldfish, and some can be quite boneheaded about it.
On top of that, it's a lot easier to be relentless when all it takes is sitting behind a keyboard. The Internet has birthed a whole new generation of stalkers of all kinds, and that is a sad fact.
In all this, the law is now swamped and totally overrun by this potential. Libel laws were designed when one person could be found guilty of slandering another. Today, millions can potentially be found guilty of slandering the same person. How to manage that without locking courts up with slander cases until the end of time, excluding more important things like criminal assault, homicide and kidnapping ?
And you can't really say that people are just going to have to thicken their skin - sadly there have been suicides due to this online behavior. Even though that would be the best solution.
I have no idea what the solution is, but it seems to me that the law is not going to help here. This is a social issue that will just have to find a social solution, not a legal one. And, as much as I don't really like the idea, it seems to me that online anonymity is going to be the casualty of this situation.
After all, the evil slanderers and stalkers do their deeds mostly because they think they cannot be traced - until the cops show up at their door with a warrant. So maybe if they knew beforehand that everything they do and say on the Internet can be immediately pinned to their name and address, maybe then they would think twice before gratuitously insulting and harassing someone.
Sounds a bit two-faced to me. They're being consulted on the content of a bill proposal and they want to keep it secret so nobody knows what advantages they get out of it. So, when the bill passes, they really won't have anything to complain about, since they'll have already negociated their advantages.
But I do agree with one thing : it is indeed up to the people to demand public negociations and discussions on any matter pertaining to individual privacy and freedom.
So, when do YOU start the posters and the street signs ?
"one of the most serious cases of violation of data protection regulations" is only worth a piddling €150K fine ?
No wonder multinational companies do what they like. It's not like they have much to be scared of. The only real goof is the court of public opinion, and Google has manipulated that like a charm (yes it did, it's only us geeks who are all up in arms about this - Joe Public has already forgotten even hearing about it).
We lost it when we saw RIAA suing grandmothers and underage children for ridiculous charges and didn't take the torches and pitchforks to their headquarters to hang the fucker in charge as a warning to other CEOs.
From that point on, companies have opened their eyes to the fact that they can implement any privacy-invasive measure they please and, as long as Joe Public can still post pics on his Wall, he's good.
I blame the increasing selfishness of society, coupled with the apathy of those who only want (for example) their next football fix and couldn't care less what it might cost others to get it.
THIS : "all with fondle-happy touchscreen navigation"
Violates the Prime Directive of Driving : Eyes On The Road, Hands On The Wheel.
As such, the ONLY control features that are acceptable are ones we don't need to look at to use (i.e. steering wheel buttons).
Anything else, especially touchscreen (which MANDATES that you look at which point of the screen you are touching) is nothing but a danger to safe driving and should be banned outright, or at the very least only allowed when the vehicle is stationary.
We all know that the only reason it is actually there at all is for DRM and RIAA/MPAA-placating purposes.
There is no other excuse for this abomination against Logic, and the Registry doesn't hold a candle to a simple text file in terms of stability and backup/restore ease and confidence.
A 0.1% improvement yielding 100,000 times better performance is worth a paper ?
Honey ? You know my drinking habit ? Well I just reduced my consumption by 0.1% !
<thwack!> Ow ! Why aren't you happy ? <bash!> Ouch ! But this is scientific progress ! <boink!> Ahh! (etc...)
Frankly I don't see why people are getting all worked up over it - it's not their money after all.
A private company is welcome to build the stupidest things it wants to, and with well over $100 billion to play with, Apple can spare $5 billion on nonsense like this.
Yes, I do think it's useless to build a round building. I suspect either a lot of space will be wasted, or a lot of money will be (to buy expensive rounded furniture). No, I am not particularly impressed with the "eco-friendly" claim that is being made. It's a massive building, there will be massive amounts of trucks and Caterpillars and such gas-guzzlers buzzing around there for years, and only time will tell if the build quality is worth it and the temperature-control methods envisioned are really all that efficient. In any case, it is the project of a private company, with private money, that is not going to cause oil spills or massive ecological damage. It's a building, and it's Apple's building. If Apple's shareholders want it, they get it, end of.
It is no use criticizing billionaire projects - those people don't live in the same world we do. We can, however, point and laugh at shareholders who prefer squandering money instead of getting dividends. Those shareholders being billionairs, it won't be much use either (except to make ourselves feel good).
Great idea.
I'm sure the Mafia (Russian or other) and the Yakuza (not to mention the Triads) will wholeheartedly agree.
<sarcasm>Actually, one must wonder if placing authority in the hands of criminals would not be more beneficial than leaving it in the hands of professional liars, sorry, politicians.</sarcasm>
<cynism>One thing is sure, if your mayor is a hardened criminal, there will be much greater respect for his "laws" since everyone knows that the penalty for transgressing them is a lump of lead between the eyes.</cynism>
retweaking your privacy settings.
Oops, wrong thread.
Yet, with all those support people, Facebook is still not online 100% of the time, there have been failures.
Makes you step back and ponder that famous "cloud" wonderworld where everyone and his dog is offering to harbor your data.
Seems like it actually takes competence to maintain a cloud operation. Does every cloud provider have that competence ?
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
