Posts by Pascal Monett

Ball lightning is all in the mind, say Austrian physicists

"You can't alter the evidence"

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Have you already forgotten the Bush era ?

Best Buy tech finds 'child abuse' wallpaper on broken PC

In light of this remark

How much worse is it when you're framed for paedo stuff you really didn't do, in this day and age ?

I mean okay, maybe he IS a scumbag lowlife getting his kicks out of the suffering and mental scarring of helpless children.

But maybe he actually isn't. There seems to be a few scenarios in which the guy could actually have nothing to do with the problem.

Either way, his name is posted on these here Intarwebs, along with the crime he has not yet been found guilty for.

I'm not one to protect a paedo, hell I'd be just as happy to watch one hang as the rest of you, but this guy is not yet tried and found guilty by law - yet his life is already harder because, in the years to come, his name will forever be associated with paedo pics.

And if he's innocent, and there is yet a chance he is, that is a terrible burden to bear.

So, next time El Reg, even if other sites are not so delicate, could you please refrain from editorially condemning a possibly innocent person of the currently abject crime of kiddy-fiddling before a judge has officially said "have at him, this useless piece of shite paedo is guilty" ?

Consumers still want it hard

Count me in !

I totally agree. I want my books in paper format, I want to "see" my video and music collection, and I have no interest whatsoever in giving the entertainment industry the possibility of spying on me.

Make no mistake, I read a lot of stuff on a screen. But reading for leisure and reading for work are two different things.

And besides, it's hardly ecological to insist on doing everything we usually do with electronic thingys that require batteries. There is no such thing as an eco-friendly battery.

You want green computing ? Don't buy an e-reader, buy a BOOK !

Mobile phone users have fewer brain tumours

I don't think it's that

I think that, given the fact that the team is "rubbishing its own results", they set out to prove the cancer risk, found nothing significant, and said to themselves : "not possible, we're dopes".

Since they still had to publish something, they decided to destroy their own credibility instead of recognize that there might be no measurable effect.

World+bitch flocking to expose self on Facebook

fake accounts with fake info ?

Already done, guv.

Waiting for the consequences.

half your female Facebook friends

90% of which are actually grown men living in their mother's basement.

Pirate Bay now run from Pirate Party 'mountain bunker'

"what we already provide to activists around the world"

Um, sorry ? I don't mean to be rude, but how can a political party founded just 4 years ago already provide stuff to "activists around the world" ?

What financial boon do they have that allows them to throw money willy-nilly without a thought or a care ?

If financing bandwidth is a drop in the bucket for this new organisation, what is their warchest and what do they destine it for ?

I'm a tad curious.

Microsoft: 'Using IE6 is like drinking 9-year-old milk'

Let me correct that for you

The sooner IE is dead and buried the better!

There, that's better.

Oh, the irony

It was like 9-year-old milk when it came out already.

Now it is a poisonous compound fit for Level 4 military chemical labs. And it's offspring have grown legs and run off into the wild.

Site auto-trawls embarrassing Facebook posts

Yes, you are

The other people who "generally think[s] "meh" and ignores everything going on on FB" are the ones who do not have a FaceBook account.

And, for email, FaceBook is now an email system ? If that is the case, then why on Earth do you specifically choose the most sewer-laden system in the world when you go with, heck, even Hotmail would be better at this point ?

Finally, concerning the "bitching", well, we're on the Internet. What did you do here if not bitch as well, but on another tack ?

Facebook founder called trusting users dumb f*cks

Interesting

You have a basically fake FB account just to be able to tell people that you have one.

Is it so difficult to just tell people you don't want one ? I never found that it was a problem.

EU privacy watchdogs say Facebook changes 'unacceptable'

Ah, Facebook

If it didn't exist, we wouldn't notice.

Google screws Scroogle

It's the same in France

It's unconstitutional to know who votes for who in baguette country.

Regbollocks ?

Uh, technically they have been blocked, albeit perhaps not intentionally.

I don't see where El Reg is at fault for reporting this, nor do I see any particular bias in the article.

Maybe you should have read the entire article before answering ?

Intel chief commits to doubled profit, revenue growth

"one moneyman asked him for a breakdown"

Party pooper !

Way to ruin the atmosphere. Wouldn't happen if Jobs had said it.

And if it did, there'd be one very angry crowd ready to deal some "people's justice" then and there !

Followers vanish as Twitter tw*ts tweet bug

12 ? Nonsense !

When my daughter was 12 she could type in English better than that - and English isn't even her mother tongue !

Dodgy Facebook pages used to power 'spam a friend' joke scam

Re:Facebook will become another cluttered, dead social network

It can't happen fast enough.

Fujitsu demos next-gen color e-paper

On the right track

Seems that they doing it right to me.

Not quite there yet, but getting there.

So keep it up, people !

Voting chaos in not-fit-for-purpose electoral system

"the scope for error is huge"

You're talking about Diebold voting machines now, aren't you ?

Paper balloting is not perfect, just as about anything that humans are up to these days, but the traceability and indeed the very lack of technology ensures that the results are verifiable and accountable.

Voting machines, such as the ones made by Diebold (who has since distanced itself as much as possible from the problem), are another problem entirely. To the various security issues that are purely hardware and software-based, you can add lack of traceability and the very possible ability to fudge results without any control.

I prefer paper ballots any day.

Twitter: It's the end of the sysadmin as we know it

Don't make fun of the kids

It's important to note that they are making progress, rediscovering ancient truths and understanding their implications.

In another two or three decades, they'll have grown up and understood the importance of good administration, and will be knocking on the Web 3.0 kids who will be, in turn, discovering that you need to control user authentication.

It's a learning process, guys. Let the kids learn.

HAMR knocks perpendicular recording down a notch

Don't we already do that with optical media ?

Heat the surface before writing data - yep, it's done on CDs, DVDs, HDDVDs and BRDVDs. And probably some other I don't remember right now.

So they are saying that hard discs are about to go optical. To write data we're going to have to wait for a laser to heat the surface and then let a magneto-thingy change polarities on perpendicular nanoscale thingamajigs.

Do they still guarantee sub-10 millisecond write times ? Or are we going to have hard discs rated at 5ms read/150ms write performance ?

.XXX accuses ICANN of 'lip service' on porn domain

It's the ostrich theory

The US Christian extremists are expert in wanting to abolish any sign of what they don't want people to be doing.

Letting the .xxx domain go through unhindered is acknowledging the existence of porn, and that is simply not possible.

So they hem and they haw and they scream at the top of their lungs that there should be no .xxx and that will stop all that porn from happening.

There would normally be some irony in the fact that the US is responsible for over 89% of porn websites on the Internet, generating over $2 billion in revenue yearly, but given that we are talking about the US, it is redundant and therefor not worth mentioning.

What I really think is that there is probably a good share of that $2 billion stash that is due to US Christian anti-porn extremists going for a wicked ogle in secret, and if the .xxx TLD becomes real, they'll actually have to block it from their Internet access, thus cutting off their supply of sinful joy.

DVLA off-road system seriously off-message

lose the support of motorists

Hm, strange, I thought that happened a while ago already.

In fact, I'm not sure I ever remember a time when "motorists" actually supported the scheme.

Political pundits, for sure, but regular motorists ?

Oh, but this "support" is undoubtedly the same than that of the ID scheme, right ?

Okay, okay, I'm moving along, don't push.

Microsoft: 'Prepare for 15 billion more clients'

Meanwhile

In MS-land, we learn that people have 10 PCs for every TV in the house.

Now I don't know about you, but in my house there are 2 TVs and 2 PCs and I'm a gamer and something of a tech freak.

In a normal household, there is the TV, period. In many households, there is probably a TV and a console, maybe 2 TVs and a console. In houses where the occupants are a bit more tech-savvy, there might be 2 TVs, a console or three, and a PC or two.

But for the life of me, the only house where I can imagine that there are 10 times more PCs than TVs is the house of that madman with 40 WoW accounts.

So, "PCs [...] in the hundreds of millions" and "TVs [...] in the tens of millions" strikes me as quite an unrealistic view of the household situation.

Let us take an extreme example : Belgium. That country has a 99% TV penetration, which means that practically every single household has at least one TV.

Who is going to say that every one of them also has a PC ? Not going to happen.

But hey, this is MS-land, where anything good for MS can happen. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid, Mr. Dallas.

Brazil shells out for 244 teraflop Cray super

Well, so much for the weather forecast

They're improving their weather-forecasting power ? So long accurate forecasts, then.

When they doubled the weather forecast points in France and improved the hardware, they started making 5-day forecasts.

Ever since then there's a 50/50 chance they get it wrong for the next 24 hours, and no sane French person will ever trust what they for 5 days hence.

Good weather forecasts have been lost with all hands.

Oh, wait ...

Google backpedals on IP 'anonymization' claim

"We believe . . ."

"We believe anonymizing IP addresses after 9 months and cookies in our search engine logs after 18 months strikes the right balance."

Oh yeah ? Well I believe that anonymizing my IP address after 9 days and not retaining cookie data in your search logs strikes a perfectly reasonable balance in my eye.

In fact, I don't see why you need to log my IP address for more than a day. Once you've had no connection from me for more than 3 hours it means I'm in bed and you should anonymize my IP address right away.

Hackers crack Ubisoft always-online DRM controls

No, there is no checkout needed

Sorry to insist, but I have rebuilt my computer a number of times, and reformatted the OS dozens of times.

Checkout is simply not possible when you've nuked your OS partition, and that has never kept me from logging on Steam and playing my games.

Your technical arguments on Steam appear to be a bit out of date.

And the fact that you don't INTEND to infringe is no longer - unfortunately - part of the deal. On that point, I must concede that you are right.

As for ownership of the games I have, be they under Steam or on DVD, there is a marked tendency of the entertainment industry to believe that the individual only has a license, on that point I concede that you are also right and I very much resent this direction.

However, I maintain that, of all the nuisance schemes that exist today, Steam is certainly the one that has bothered me the least and has given me the best impression that it respects MY property.

The day they throw a switch and I can no longer play any of my Steam games (like EAGames already did to me with Battlefield 2142), then I will agree that you are totally right and I never owned them.

Until that day, it seems to me that Steam is playing fair. Yes, they potentially have the ability to lock me out of my games, that I cannot deny. But the days where games could not call home to check in are long gone, and nobody can go back on that.

We have to make do with the situation now, and right now Steam and StarDock are doing it best.

In my opinion, of course.

Buy the game, play the pirate version

Did that with Painkiller.

Came back home with a shiny, collectors edition of the game and it never wanted to install.

It's quite a shock when you slip the official, paid-for disc, launch the setup and get a "Please insert dics 1" error message !

Painkiller was so locked up nothing would do to get it work, and the store has a policy about open games meaning it gives itself the right to refuse returns of open game boxes, so I was stuck with my game that refused to install.

Result ? I torrented it, and was finally able to play MY game.

Disgusting.

Sorry, but it is NOT a rent

I simply cannot agree with you on this point.

Steam is by far the least annoying of all online game selling stores.

Let's be clear on one thing : if YOU sold games online, what would YOU do to ensure that the person accessing your services was the one that had the right to do so ?

Steam does have online checks, that is true, I cannot deny it. But you can play offline.

More importantly, when you upgrade or change computer, you do not have to reinstall Steam OR your game folder from scratch. Steam lets you port your whole Steam setup to a totally different PC - all you need to do is log on with your credentials and bingo! - your games are there and playable for you.

Contrast that with EAGames, whose download center is absolute crap and needs to be reinstalled from scratch - and games re-downloaded (all 12BG of them) every time you so much as patch your graphics card. I abandoned that one in a hurry.

Ubisoft has certainly proven itself to not be even able to think of its paying customers in pursuit of failing to prevent piracy, so count them out of the user-friendly universe.

The only other service that has any chance of standing with Steam on the same level of useability and user-friendliness is StarDock with its Impulse service. Anything else is just a nuisance that either takes over your PC without any right to do so, or is so paranoid about piracy that any change to your PC configuration makes it fall dead.

No sir, I'm sorry but Steam lets you play your games with far less hassle than anybody but StarDock, and over multiple PC reconfigurations to boot.

In my book, that is called user-friendly, and proper customer service. The only real issue is the difficulty that Steam has in letting you give one of your games to someone else. That is pretty much impossible. But give them time, I'm sure they'll think of something.

Microsoft's 'record' quarter can't match Apple

33 percent unit increase

Yeah, and thanks to that soaring success, Apple has finally broken past the 10% market share limit.

Uh, but only for the USA. In the rest of the world, Apple is still loitering at 5% market share.

So yeah, lol.

Amazon rides shoe-fetishist to 68% profit leap

True that

The Kindle is indeed grossly overvalued.

Oh, you were talking about the stock market ? Sorry, I tend to not worry about things I can do nothing about.

NHS computers hit by voracious, data-stealing worm

It's a twofold problem

First of all, management wants people to work quickly without much training. Instead of creating a Linux network with a bespoke application and spending money on hours of training to use the platform, they prefer the idea of a Windows network with a bespoke application and spending money on a small booklet that will explain the salient points, leaving users to guess the rest.

Second, there is the support issue. And today, whether you like it or not, consultants and technicians who know Windows are a dime a dozen. Those who know Linux are . . . well nobody even knows how many there are.

Cameron promises yet more Avatar

Hang on

6 more minutes ? So now we have Star Wars-type rewrites that are implemented in less than a year after the original screening ?

Good Lord, at least Lucas was polite enough to wait until most fans had worn out their VHS tapes of the originals before creating his "definitive vision" release.

Anyway, are we going to get a shark moment in Avatar 2, what with all the ocean stuff ? I mean, Pandora it may be, but there's not much chance that water pressure will be taken into account any better than it was in Phantom Menace, now is there ?

Space Station lightsabre-sparring hoverdroids to be upgraded

If I recall correctly

when you wire two batteries together without any resistor, you get current flowing so fast the batteries heat up and end up melting.

So what's to bet that this "power exchange" thingy will end up in two lumps of very hot metal floating in the ISS ?

Suddenly that doesn't sound so funny.

Fring cops to unchangeable passwords

Another service I will not be using

Thank you, El Reg, for keeping me informed of all these malware services I do not want to touch with a 20-foot bargepole.

On a related note, who the hell thought it was a good idea to never even ALLOW password changing ? In what IT universe does that person exist ? Does he use Hotmail ?

Youth reject Facebook's death of privacy claims

"[those] who abuse personal data should face jail"

Damn right.

Political targeting: An unhealthy business

Good

It is seriously time that people notice just how distasteful and privacy-violating targeted marketing can be.

School secretly snapped 1000s of students at home

Let me see if I get this straight

In order to protect our precious children from paedos in the streets, we'll give pic-snapping capability to so-called safety products so that we can have our kids oogled at by IT workers in our schools - positions now undoubtedly extremely sought after by . . . paedos.

So all is well now, right ?

Google in talks to re-admit Android to Linux kernel

Forks are good

but only up to a point.

Too many forks dilute the available coding time for each fork, thus reducing the chance to get each fork to a viable status, thereby increasing the chance that every fork will, ultimately, fail.

Intel: Killer cables may leapfrog USB 3.0

10Gbps ?

So when is this going to replace our old 100Mbps Ethernet cables ?

Popular Facebook game caught serving malvertisements

Well whaddya know

Facebook, as much as I despise the rank stupidity that it exhales, just might turn out to be useful after all.

As an experience in managing large hordes of idiots continuously assaulted by large hordes of malfeasants, that is.

I look forward to more accounts of how Facebook gets hacked in various ways, what solutions are found and how many people that obnoxious 'bitch' kid manages to piss off in the process.

Austrian takes pickaxe to Street View spymobile

Call Hollywood

This requires a feature-film adaptation. May I suggest a working title ? Street View Zombies takes my fancy.

Yahoo! tech! boss! quits!

That's wierd

It's funny how the "family reasons" excuse immediately ticks a "fired" box in my mind.

Especially when followed by quotes mentioning "dream job" right after.

Come on, people, quit the transparent double-talk. He's not going to go look after his family, he's going to go look for another job because he's been sacked.

How not to screw up an ERP implementation

"bang heads together when they don't"

I've been in this kind of situation, parachuted in an organization where the key project people went missing 6 months into the project - not enough time to devote to the project any more.

I got to handle the users directly, make all development decisions myself - without any authority to say no to anyone. Tried once, and got rapped on the fingers, hard.

Of course, eighteen months later, the project was working - I do know how to code - but nobody was happy. Not my boss, not the customer, and most certainly not me.

I really would like someone to tell me how I could have banged a few heads together. The only head that got banged was mine, and I'm looking for a job now.

Microsoft teams with Google in name of privacy

Microsoft teams with Google

Just the title sends a shiver down my spine.

I mean, think about it : the world's most prolific bug-and-insecurity generator has teamed with the worlds most powerful user data collator.

My guess is that the LHC collision yesterday did actually end the world.

Novell (not SCO) owns UNIX, says jury

are becoming ?

Nay, my good sir. They were a laughing stock last millenia.

Now they have become distasteful lepers.

Soon they will become shambling zombies.

Maybe then someone will finally blow their brains out.

Video giant embraces Flash-phobic iPad with HTML 5

So it's HD vs Blu-Ray all over again

Only this time the contenders are H.264 vs Ogg Vorbis.

And it seems that, surprise, surprise, the big money is going towards the codec that requires a license. Color me shocked.

The only little grain of sand in this clockwork play is that the medium is the Internet. This is not some living-room issue where the likes of Sony can shoehorn their solution with a trojan game console under the noses of the clueless.

The Internet has a marked tendency to prefer open and free.

But hey, this battle will be faught for decades, so be sure to grab lots of popcorn.

Tinfoil Condition Red! LHC 7 TeV mega-blasts today

Oh dear !

The armchair prophets are in a turmoil ! The end is nigh !

Excuse me while I consider the vast implications of the proclamations made by wise entities who haven't got a clue.

Hmm, seems to me there are no implications. Sounds rather like Paco Rabanne prophetizing the dreadful land-impact of Mir, and in the end such pie-in-the-sky foretellers will be proven to be just as wrong as he was.

I mean really, if it was so easy to divine the end of the world, given the number of times I've had Jehovah's Witnesses falling over themselves to warn me I think we'd already be done with the whole thing and playing our harps in the rosy clouds.

No, the world is not going to end. Not before the Sun goes nova anyway. Suck it up, doomsayers, and go rant about porcine fever or something.

Apple uncloaks deep details of its 11 iPad apps

Speaking of batteries . .

Can you replace them on this Pad thingy, or does Apple once again expect you to buy another one when the battery dies ?

Facebook prepares for another privacy row with its users

"we look forward to providing ... new privacy controls"

And we look forward to watching just how badly those fail.