Posts by Pascal Monett 19394 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Not many, not any more. Most of the sites I have a login on send you a link that allows you to reset your password within a certain time limit. You click the link and must set a new password.
As long as the miscreants don't change your email address, that seems fine to me.
And it will do so on several levels.
First, the Anonymous members who put themselves in charge of this project will be unmasked, either through some detective work on the part of a news group, another hacker group, or some guy they managed to tick off because of something they said or did or didn't say or didn't do (hey, nutjobs are legion).
Second, it will fail because there is no way that a social site, with the avowed intent of taking on Google and Facebook, can be created by one person, thus there has to be a group taking on the task. And, as every working person knows, the more people you put on a project, the more the chance of a jerk being part of said group. Said jerk will inevitably throw a spanner in the proceedings by outing the group, publishing names or something of equal jerkitude.
Third, and last, the sheer magnitude of this project is going to wear them down and break them. Behind their grandstanding and posturing, what we have is a group of people who come together to revel in a bit of chaos by doing what they think they do best : hacking other people's servers. This kind of activity, which they consider fun, is something they can do when they're ready and willing, and holds the thrill of success to drive them on. Building and managing a social site is light-years on the opposite of such 007-ness. It is a job, a mountain of work, with all the dreary day-to-day Mondays that that implies. They will have to be on their toes from day one, every day, without fail, else there will be issues. On top of that, they will have to learn to deal with unhappy people, something that posting a file accompanied by gloating text does not really prepare for.
All that said, I wish them luck with their reintegration project. And I wait for the day that their site gets hacked by the inevitable upcoming hacker group out to prove a point. I'll be interested in seeing the reaction of ancient hackers gone corporate.
I always thought Defense stuff was so secret that you could not even talk about it outside the special room you were supposed to work on it.
I've been called in as a consultant for banks that have more security than these jokers (no laptop, couldn't touch keyboard and could only look at screen when operator authorized me to do so).
Well, yeah, I guess. After all, IE6 single-handedly broke web standards so badly that 90% of web developer time was spent finding workarounds to make sales sites work properly.
That must be Microsoft's yardstick for success.
Now, can we please dispense with the age considerations ? Software is not a car that can rust and run down. Software will run for as long as the hardware works. Make hardware that runs for 100 years and the software will keep chugging away. Or, in Microsoft's case, bugging away.
The only reason IE6 "worked" for a decade is because Microsoft shat it out and was too lazy to do anything about updating it. Now, with all the alternates around and Internet suddenly appearing on Microsoft's radar, we get IE7, 8 and 9 in the space of 5 years, plus 10 coming up soon, which shows clear signs of panic in the Internet Exploder division at Redmond. That is NOT worth an ovation of any kind.
Thanks a bunch for improving on the spastic, ADD-enhancing experience.
I can't wait to see all that gesturing in a crowded bus or metro. I am impatient to view just how many times a file will be transferred by a youngster who cannot understand that the transfer time is superior to the flick time.
Thank goodness that all this nonsense will never actually translate into a user interface requirement. Data transfers are to be initiated in a controlled manner, via keyboard for proper targetting, authorization and exchange, not by randomly jerking a thingy around.
Somebody keep the kids out of the workplace, please ?
I ordered my first 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 at the end of last April - it never worked. OCZ replaced it immediately and the replacement has been working flawlessly since.
Based on that experience, I just bought another one. The performance boost in Windows is nothing short of impressive - but that is, of course, SSD, not OCZ.
Nonetheless, I count myself as a happy OCZ customer - for the moment.
Once again, the fundamental question arises : what is this tiny company making ?
The only products I know that allow me to view a map and plan an itinerary on my computer are Mappy, TomTom Home and, now that I have read this article, Bing.
Nevery heard of anyone else doing it, so I'll wager that this tiny company is nothing but a patent-holder waiting for just this kind of opportunity.
Could we please rewrite patent law to just include the phrase : "if you don't make anything with your patent, you cannot accuse others of infringing" ?
Pretty please ?
Before I snap and start bombing the companies that do this ?
When one leaves a legacy, it means that what the people left do is due to one's actions and influence.
Given Microsoft's legal history, Virgil leaves no legacy at all, because if his point of view was to work together without suing people, then it's one long failure.
It's a wonder he stayed there so long.
They get quite bandied about, those poor billions, don't they ? The GPS accuses LightSquared to cost the country almost $100 billion (why stop at $96, by the way ?), LightSquared says they'll generate $120 billion so it's fine.
Well no, it is not fine. If you kill 9 people to save 12, I doubt very much that the relatives of the 9 dead will appreciate.
In other news, piracy costs upwards of $1200 billion per year (following my latest guesstimate which is just as reliable as anything Gartner can say on the subject).
Man, thank God we have an economy so robust that it can just go on working despite all those billions going down the drain !
But when I switched to Win7, it became a hassle to install properly. Every time I wanted to open a .doc, it would complain about something not being installed. The first twenty times I slotted in the CD, as per request, and got a complement of installation - at least that is what was said.
After that, I just cancelled the installation popup and worked as usual. When I got fed up with the bloomin' popup, I installed LibreOffice and it does everything I need it to do - intuitively.
And the rest of my family has no issues with LibreOffice either.
So MS Office is now permanently retired from my home PCs. And I don't see any reason to go back to it.
The point is, you only pay once. That is very much the preferred regime for any private individual, and for many small companies as well.
Paying every month for the privilege of having someone in India respond to your support calls in gibberish is becoming more and more unacceptable. But hey, the guys that got the outsourcing idea in the first place are rich today, no doubt about that.
Surely that should read "paying decent wages and supporting its robots in comfortable middle-class lifestyles" ?
I mean, since when has American capitalism worried about the lifestyle of its workers ? If the robots are the ones working, then it is the robots who get the decent working conditions.
You're not meaning to tell me that employers are going to keep humans on the payroll if it is the robots doing the job ? That would be counterproductive, and the beancounters will torpedo that idea after the first quarter.
Especially if they've been replaced by robots as well.
That should read :
"George Lucas has found one more excuse to milk the endless souvenir pit of his fans once again by destroying yet another successful thing associated with Star Wars and will produce a Lego Star Wars TV special which has the potential to suck slightly less than his previous attempt, the widely embarrassing Star Wars Christmas Special. The horror will be unleashed some time this automn, and hopefully will not destroy too many budding careers."
There, corrected it for you.
Well colour me astonished. After all, why wouldn't I want to trust everyday details of my private life to some company that will store it oversees where I have no recourse in case of trouble, and no guarantee of proper privacy ?
Really, I can't imagine why the masses didn't flock to this unique opportunity to be profiled in a very, very intimate way in exchange for the pleasure of perusing one's own life online (and maybe someone else's life if the proper hack gets known).
Nice. How about creating realities that I can't tell I'm in a computer game ?
Such as trees that fall in front of a tank, or get blown to shreds by bombs, or torch and burn down if a flamethrower is pointed at them. Or walls that cannot resist a tank, not to mention packs of C4, and houses that get flattened by aerial bombardement.
How about realistic craters from a bomb ? One that a soldier can hide in and shoot from ? And can we once and for all get rid of indestructible doors that only open once a certain condition has been realised, and ignores any attempt at brute force ?
Making prettier environments is nice, but I'd wager Medal of Honor, Battlefield 2 and Gears of War have already demonstrated a very pretty world. Making environments more "realistic" does not mean just veined leaves on trees.
Sorry, but no.
Legislation states very clearly that a contract is a binding agreement between two parties. Any change must be met with agreement by both parties. That's the most important thing I learned in my feeble amount of commercial law studies as an accountant.
If SLA contracts can change without agreement of one party, then SLAs are worth no more than EULAs and should be ignored as such.
I am eagerly waiting for the day someone will finally have the guts and determination to disembowel this travesty of commercial contract once and for all, preferably with a red-hot katana.
Once upon a time, a contract was eye-to-eye, verbal agreement sealed by handshake. Once it was shook on, it was inviolate and unalterable, come flood or earthquake or meteor.
Today, commerce is nothing but a shark-infested pit filled to the gills with liars and nancys who will go to any length to not own up to their responsibilities and respect the word that was given. It is high time that the law was properly imposed on all this nonsense.
Apparently, some people are blaming the console version for the amount of negativity in the reviews.
Independantly of the gameplay, which should not change between an Xbox and a PC, there appears to be technical issues and exaggeratedly long load times.
I remember a time where console fanatics were heralding the "death of the PC" due to the "perfect accomodation" of a known platform with set characteristics versus the heterogenous nature of the PC gaming hardware.
Seems that the PC continues winning.
The EU has generally been at the forefront where personal privacy is concerned, and good on them for that.
Unfortunately, the EU has been seriously lacking in backbone when it comes to standing up to the outrageous demands of the US government devil spawn, Homeland Security, and that is a shame.
Let me see, generally speaking a web page shows up in 1.5 seconds. In human time, that's already pretty much instantaneous.
But of course, in a population already living in the now, it is pure entitlement to have everything RIGHT NOW, thus this product will probably be a success.
Unless, of course, people start clamoring for the first 5 links to be prerendered - which they will do tomorrow.
I wonder what happens to malware in this scenario ? Make a search that has its first link pointing to a hacked site spewing drive-by downloadable gunk, but click on the 3rd search result and never know where you got the virus from - now that is an interesting scenario.
Um, excuse me, but you obviously don't have Steam.
I do, and I have gotten games for €1.50 off it. I got Left 4 Dead 2 for all of €5 by taking advantage of a weekend special. Sure, I didn't get it the day it came out, but I am patient enough.
I do believe that, however patient you may be, you'll never get a brand-new Left 4 Dead 2 DVD for €5.
Ever.
Yeah, whereas fudging the data to fit preconcieved notions really upholds it.
You seem to have trouble understanding the scientific approach, which is logical since one has to have a certain level of intelligence to grasp its method.
Fortunately, it can be resumed in a simple concept : analyze the data every which way you can think of and see what fits with reality. When you have eliminated everything that does not fit, you can start drawing conclusions.
The problem with the scientific approach is that of the basic human attention span : anything longer than 15 seconds and the average homo sapiens glazes over and goes into a coma.
Unfortunately, science takes more than 15 seconds to establish the facts, so many, many people take one side and stick to it because the whole issue is way too complicated for the average human brain. And apparently, for some "scientists" as well.
Climatology has to do with thermodynamics, and any professor worth his salt will tell you that we haven't nailed that domain down yet. So all this climate hoopla is far from over and will only end when every single test had been made, compared to reality, extensively discussed and debated, and proper conclusions drawn.
Oh, one more thing : all that discussing, debating, comparing and concluding is supposed to be done by scientists, not journalists and very much not commentors.
Any sane person will know that we have to wait for the proper people to tell us what the facts are. Right now, nobody knows for sure.
That is why these articles keep cropping up. And they should, because the first rule of science is skepticism.
The videos for BF3 are simply stunning, no contest from me. However, I'll wait for the reviews to find out if :
- coop with bots still stupidly limited
- single player map size still stupidly limited
- no personal stats on private servers
- LAN ability severely restricted without Internet connection to control it
The basic question is : has EA understood the value of the fanbase and will EA embrace it this time around ? Because they certainly didn't before.
So if I see that they still haven't this time around, well I'm sorry but I'll pass, however tempting the title may seem.
Why, you may ask ? Because multiplayer is only good with friends. The larger Internet multiplayer environment is much too full of morons and griefers to amuse me. I'd rather play with bots.
Lots of 'em.
The cloud can only bring benefits to people who actually know what they're doing.
NHS has a looong history of not knowing what the blazes is going on anywhere, so cloud will only further muddy things up.
It's a bad idea, and therefor NHS will pick it up and run with it as far as possible. Expect to soon hear "hey, we're putting NHS IT in the cloud, all will be better as soon as we're done". And it'll only cost £1.5 billion".
But unfortunately, it seems chock full of Sith and Jedi, just like almost every other SW-themed game out there (Republic Commando being a notable exception).
I like the SW universe very much. I am unhappy with the fact that nobody seems to be able to make any other part of it interesting.
So what ? Is is rusting ? No. Does it work ? Yes.
If a 10-year-old program causes so much intellectual anguish to that guy, he'd better not learn that banks are using 50-year-old Cobol code that still works a charm.
Oh, and the technology behind the steering wheel is centuries old now, does that mean we should change to joystick ? No.
Please keep this guy out of any serious industrial project. Changing everything after 5 years just because the code "is getting old" is not something we want in our daily lives. The walls of my house are over 40 years old now, and I hope they'll stay just the same for much longer.
Mother Nature has already programmed the death of this planet. It is called the Red Giant phase of our Sun, and it will happen in 5 or 6 billion years (give or take a few hundred million or so).
Before that date, nothing short of a direct collision with a wayward planet can possibly destroy Planet Earth.
Concerning Life on this planet, however, a number of things can destroy it with great efficiency. A stray Gamma-Ray Burst pointed right at us can boil the ozone in the atmosphere, thus exposing all life to drastically increased levels of UV radiation. Cancer and genetic changes will abound as life struggles to adapt. Most will fail, including probably humans.
A large asteroid, anywhere above 5 km in diameter, will most probably wipe out all life on the surface of the planet, leaving the deepest parts of the oceans as possible havens for whatever is left.
Those are just two ways that Mother Nature can put an end to life on Earth.
But Earth itself will endure. And life will most probably reappear whatever happens, as even in the worst-case scenario a propitious asteroid can re-seed the planet with the required building blocks.
Of course it's a small number, it's always a small number.
Even if it concerns 10 million people, it's a small number since Skype has hundreds of millions of subscribers.
That's the beauty of a large customer base : you can piss off millions at a time and keep saying that it's marginal with a straight face.
It's the USA, people. If they want to bomb you back to the Stone Age, well, they've already proven that Geneva Convention means nothing to them, so this is but another excuse in the list.
And I'm sure that all proof needed will be treated with as much due process as the WMDs in Iraq.
What a farce.
In an ideal world, you're certainly right.
Unfortunately, the fact that regular Skype does conference calls along with the fact that business users rarely do more than that with it means that there is no special incentive to go to the business portal of Skype.
Meaning that, in any situation where the IT staff cannot be arsed to do it beforehand, the user will go to Skype.com and download the regular version - probably with all the free extras he can get.
Maybe it is (and yes, I did see what you did there), but unlike Sony, they are 1) acknowledging that there is a problem, and 2) actually attempting a first-level reaction that does have an impact.
Sure, it's not perfect, and it is not a solution either, but it's a heck of a lot better than Sony.
No, it is not. Any scientist will tell you that very little can be concluded from a sample size of one.
The only thing that we can reasonably deduce from studying our own solar system is that other stars may have planets, some of which may be gas giants.
The reason this study is interesting is the sheer number of stars we detect that do actually have planets. To think that a full third of a given sample have planets - and a disk that is facing us so we can detect them - is simply a staggering number.
In fact, it seems to me that, if 33% of star systems we can survey just happen to have planetary discs facing us, then a fair share of the others stars most probably have planetary discs as well, just not facing us.
If that is indeed the case, then we can venture that stars with planets is indeed the norm, which, all of a sudden, gives us a staggering number of planets to visit when we finally get our stuff together for intergalactic travel.
And that gives us every reason to get our species off this planet and into the stars, because once we do, near-infinite resources will become available.
