Posts by Pascal Monett 19020 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
And you've barely just finished installing it that you're already waxing lyrical about how stable and "refined" it is. People's expectations have really been lowered, I guess.
How about actually using it for a while before deciding if it is really all that good ?
And by "a while", I mean a few weeks, like six or so.
So two-thirds of respondents didn't like targeted advertising without even knowing all the facts about how it is done ? Refreshing news indeed !
And more than a third want jail time for crooks who abuse personal data ? Well, seems that this year has good news at last.
I'll have to remember this survey for the next time that a marketeer tries to get my personal info.
For Heaven's sake, publishing is the same thing on the web and on paper. There are libel laws that work perfectly well for newspapers that are printed in the hundreds of thousands of copies - so why can that same law not apply to web stuff ? Because it's electronic ? Because lawmakers can't actually find their rump without both hands ? Because some meddlesome lobbying party managed to push such stupidity in the first place ?
There are intelligent people on this planet - I'm sure of it. I don't know where they are, but maybe someone could, one day, have one of them take a look and set things straight concerning the Internet and libel.
Two previous remarks in this thread are spot on, so _someone_ should be able to translate that into lawyerspeak and have at it, no ?
Intellectual property is created by people, not by companies. People may need the funding of companies to create, but they are the ones creating.
This whole patent mess is directly the cause of letting patents obey the law of the market. Remove patents from the market, and the mess goes away by itself.
So patents should be the sole right of the individuals that put their name on the patent. Only those individuals can decide who has the right to exploit the patent they have. Rights to the patent cannot be sold. Rights to exploit the patent cannot be sold without the express consent of the individuals who own the patent. When said individuals die, the patent lapses into the public domain.
Of course, that leaves the possibility of companies killing the individuals that hold a patent in order for it to fall into the public domain, but I think we already have enough laws to deal with that consequence.
"People in favor of abolishing WGA . . ."
Yeah sure. Well, let's put this in another context. Let's suppose that every single time you wanted to start up your car, a cop was waiting and you had to show ID and drivers license. It's still your car, you paid for it and you maintain it and insure it, but you can no longer go anywhere until the cop says okay.
And sometimes the cop is drunk and doesn't get clear instructions over the walkie-talkie, so he says no. No discussion possible, even if your wife is pregnant and on the verge of giving birth.
Still in favor of the system ?
Well I'm not. I paid for my shiny XP disk, I can take it out whenever I want and look at it as long as I like. I am ready to accept that Microsoft checks - upon installation - that there is a disk and that it is legit. After that, any following check is just harassment.
And I hate being harassed.
Next : WGA required for securing hacked PCs. I call bullshit. Those copies sold at $2 a pop have no WGA and they are the problem, so why should mine bother me when I paid through the nose for it ?
People who are in favor of draconian Big Brother surveillance have nothing to worry about, it's exactly what they are going to get. Freedom, on the other hand, needs to be faught for.
At least not until the Institut de Veille Sanitaire okays the construction of a new one that complies with all Human Rights regulations and UN criteria, which will cost billions and take at least another decade or four.
Meanwhile, notre illustre Président needs not to throw anyone anywhere, he just slips a note to his aid and scores of people get fired, or administratively displaced. The French media, like the good whipping dogs they have become in the last twenty years, keep a low profile because the various CEOs of the various French TV channels don't want the runt jumping on their balls either. And having a bad note from a President is never a good thing on a CV, now is it ?
Sarkozy is a dangerous man, so much so that three different political parties (left and center) are creating a coalition for the next presidential election. With Sarkozy's despotic behavior and unappealing demeanor, along with his plummeting ratings, it is quite possible that his current term be his only one.
His feverish efforts in "renewing" the administration and failing twelve things at a time have annoyed, then angered much too many people. His repeated appeals for patience have worn off, as has his steadfast assurance that the government is "working". Flailing about blindly is a more apt term.
Several of my friends who voted for him have told me they won't do it again. I voted for him as well, but only because the alternative was too exasperating to consider. I'll wager that a lot of blue-collar workers won't either. In any case, some people are already saying that he's done, but you won't ever hear that in a French paper. Well, not before 2011.
I think Notes is great to code on. As a professional developer, I have always found that Notes is a great tool, fit for a lot of office purposes. And after over 14 years with it, I've seen a good share of application types.
Unfortunately, I must admit that the UI complaint is quite undeniable, and I understand that people are put off by it. IBM should have put a stop to that nonsense when it purchased Lotus, and made R5 adopt a bog-standard Windows interface. That would have been a sea change for Notes, and speculation abounds with possibilities concerning what could have happened had IBM done that.
But it didn't happen. Not only did IBM leave Notes saddled with the same, mind-boggling interface, but it failed to impress on management types that Notes was to be used for much more than just mail. As a result, many companies tried Notes for mail only, and did no development whatsoever of any application, thus removing almost all reason for having it in the first place.
I hate to say it, because I think that Exchange's place is anywhere but in the professional market, but I fully understand a company that used Notes for mail only, then decided to swap for Exchange. It is indeed a logical decision. Exchange does indeed do mail well enough for the average user, and that is all that is requested. Learning a new interface is not something that the mass market does readily.
Thus IBM has seriously shot itself in the foot with Notes - which is probably why the latest release is all about making Domino apps behave like web apps. The more apps that are designed with the latest techniques in Domino development, the more people will be using Notes from a browser without even knowing it.
And that just might spell the return of Notes in the corporate market, but only if IBM starts marketing the heck out of it and avoids the word "Notes" like the plague.
It is my opinion that if you're incapable of clearly stating that which you wish to say, then your opinion is not of much worth anyway.
If you know what you want to say and you can express it to others without error, then you're worth listening to.
One typo can be accepted, because we are all, as a civilization, in much too much of a hurry, but a flurry of "cant", "there" instead of "their", accompanied by other glaring mistakes is no longer a typo, it is a sure sign of an incomplete mind, one whose ramblings are best ignored until it grows up and learns how to wield a language properly.
No, it hasn't. XP is usable, and I'm used to it now. But every time Microsoft makes a new Windows, it introduces fundamental changes to the interface without actually leaving the good and correcting the bad.
It's just a child tinkering around. The most irksome thing about it is that Microsoft has a number of white papers about interface design and respecting the habits of the user. The managers in charge of Vista and 7 should have read those.
I'm tired of having to re-learn an OS, and 7 does not give me any incentive to think that it is in any way better than Vista - nor is there any indication that 7 does not have what I did not like in Vista (namely, the DRM).
Are they so desperate for work that they need a totally land-based infrastructure to work against ?
I mean, really, why is it that the Air Force gets to play with this so-called Elite section ? Sounds to me like another case of inflated ego. I'm sure the Army could have done the job just as well.
Ever since Ballmer, Microsoft has gone from headache to disaster to debacle.
Why is Ballmer the Monkey Boy still at the helm of Microsoft ? What on God's green Earth has him glued to the command chair like that ?
In any other company, a failure the size of Vista would have seen the CEO leave to spend more time with his family, and yet Ballmer is still spouting nonsense in the name of Microsoft. Does he have the shareholders locked up or something ? Zombified ? Hooked on drugs ?
What is it going to take to get rid of him ?
I think we should be told.
And cry me a river. Mentioning the retail channel as an excuse is particularly patronizing on Microsoft's part, given what we know about their sales contracts.
Its like the schoolyard bully getting caught hitting a kid half his size, then arguing that, if punished, said kid won't get his quota of daily exercise. Ridiculous.
And what is it with Microsoft lawyers ? Is there a special screening procedure at Redmond in order to only retain the pricks ? I can't understand why the judge doesn't string them up for contempt.
It seems to me that, if a bank accepts a credit application at face value, then it can only blame itself for getting swindled.
I would have thought that, in order to accept a credit application, a bank would run all sorts of checks. At the very least, the bank would normally call the employer and verify the salary and hiring date. That really feels like a bare minimum to me.
But apparently they're not even doing that. No wonder we are in an economic crises.
I say send the petty criminals back where they came from, and drag the banks into court for failure to comply with security measures in a time of hardship.
I very greatly doubt that gaming makes you fat. Gaming itself does not force you to have bad eating habits, nor does it tie you to the chair and remove your ability to exercise (or think, for that matter).
Gaming is just another activity, a hobby that one can adopt or not.
Now, I would be much more inclined to believe a study that declares that insecure, insufficiently-socialized people with poor communication skills and little respect for their own body (or a poor grasp of personal health) might have a greater than normal tendency of turning to computer gaming (and why not so-called social networks as well) and adopt it as a replacement for more conventionally social activities where their shortcomings would be much more apparent.
Really, I can't. I'm constantly getting notices that my account has been suspended, or that there has been suspicious activity detected, or something, and then requesting me to sign on and check out my account.
Funny thing is, I don't have either a PayPal account or an eBay account. I've never trusted PayPal, which has a healthy history of screwing over its customers, so when eBay made PayPal quasi-mandatory, I decided never to use eBay either.
Stories like this one are not going to help me change my mind either.
There's always some klutz moaning about the IT angle, but here we have employees "greeted at their desks by automated phone messages from Shatner ".
Excuse me ? Has Greenpeace taken over the company phone system ? Or is each employee being phoned individually as soon as he gets to his desk (sorry, cubicle) ? And how would they know that the employee has reached his desk ?
I think we should be told.
The uni used to have a heraldic shield. Heraldry immediately associates with tradition and knowledge based upon historical experience. Heraldry also associates with reliability and respectability. The heraldic shield sends a clear message that people (students) going there are doing something good and will come back with knowledge and skills they can use for the rest of their lives.
The uni now has . . . a w-shaped black figure with colored lines crisscrossing it. The only thing that can possibly be associated with that are Sunday school drawings. Or Web 2.0 - which is like Sunday school drawings only worse.
Although I cannot deny that there is a progression, I highly doubt that it is a positive one. I am also quite incensed at the thought of all the money that was wasted on a project made by a 7-year-old. Rebranding think tanks should be shipped out to the Great Pacific Garbage Dump and sunk.
Equating a solar eclipse with yet another excuse to offload scamware is a leap of logic that I simply cannot make. Seems like I lack the immense mental faculties that are obviously required to become a successful scammer. On the other hand, I also lack the profound ability to reach for my credit card without any good reason, meaning that I will never be part of the scammer market either. Is it frustrating to witness all this activity and know I'll never be part of it ? Nope.
There was a time when you made a product, and then patented it. Nowadays, you dream up a patent and wait until someone else makes a product, then you set the attack lawyers on him.
I think it should be mandatory to have a product before filing a patent. That would settle 99% of the trolling issues. If you're not capable of making a product, you should have no right to file a patent.
Outlook using Word for email is bloatware using more bloatware. With that state of mind, it's no wonder Vista needs 4GB of RAM and a quad-core to run about well (note to trolls : don't bother refuting that).
I do email with a browser on a web-based interface. I can Bold, Underline and Italicize and that's all I need for an email. If you want to send a proper letter, by all means type it up in whatever Office version you want and send it as an attachment - but please, use a compression tool first.
For showing us that you can shaft the consumer twelve ways to Sunday and still get revenue. Thank you for giving the bright DRM religion to other companies, we really need yet more instances where what we do with the stuff we buy is subject to corporate oversight.
then it deserves to crumble.
We're talking about a construction that is less than 50 years old, right ? It's not a medieval castle, or some architectural wonder of the first millennium that deserves millions to be spend on its restoration and maintenance.
This is a building that was conceived and built with modern techniques, modern tools and modern materials. If it can't stand alone for a hundred years without continuous and expensive treatment, then it should most definitely die.
A tribute website can be made, with lots of pics and, at some point, a 3-D tour. That will be more than this thing deserves anyway.
Nice laugh I had there.
I have full XP mode right now, why on Earth should I want to shell out major cash for a new OS and use it to mimic what is already working fine ?
I didn't want Vista, so nothing that Vista has interests me (no, DX10 is not a requirement). Win 7 being just a Vista service pack, ergo it means that it has nothing more to interest me either.
I'll stay in XP mode for a while longer, I think.
As soon as Microsoft put its grubby mitts on this project, this outcome was inevitable.
What I would like to know is how those that originated this project can look at themselves in the mirror in the morning. Or has Monkey Boy given them Personal Grooming Assistants so that they don't have to any more ?
For 15 minutes, really, they could have waited fourteen more before uploading. I think this is more a case of "Upload the page now, so when the results are announced and everybody checks our page, we'll be ready".
Even so, there are rules. These morons have just learned that, once you publish on the web, it is immediately publicly available. Since these are supposed to be people who know the rules, it serves them right to be legally flogged.
Keelhaul the lot of them ! If we don't know why, they surely do !
Yadda yadda yadda (C) Microsoft PR.
We've heard that bull for every single MS product release for the past twenty years. It may even be right, but it won't keep Exchange 2010 from being an unreliable, virus-spreading turd.
The only issue Exchange 2010 is going to address is the dip of the failing MS server market - by requiring more servers to do the same, unreliable job.
2000 DVDs worth of data, that works out to about 13750 CDs of information, or the equivalent of 5.83 million floppy disks.
That could also translate to 3,645,812,500 pages of A4 text, or 364,581,250 high-quality images (although, with today's HD and pr0n, those numbers most certainly should be re-evaluated).
"Most of those actually buying and complaing DRM annoyance ... are probably pirates"
Way to reveal that you are a troll.
Remember Painkiller ? A 3-disc set that had such a tight security that the discs out of the box refused to recognize that they were legitimate ?
I ought to know, I was one of the sheep that got fleeced by that particular DRM scam. Feels reel good to bring home a legitimately-bought brand-new game and, when putting the first install CD in, getting a "Please insert original disc" error.
The only thing I hate more than DRM is people accusing those who complain about DRM of being pirates.
Besides, real pirates don't complain about DRM, they snigger quietly and go on playing the gorram game.
"Police, social services and health agencies all noted signs of abuse in the run-up to her death, but each agency acted in isolation"
Something tells me that a database is NOT the solution to this problem, better inter-agency communication is.
Maybe the police, social services and health agencies could have a dedicated Child Menace officer, tasked with keeping other agencies up-to-date on what his agency has discovered ?
But why try to be smart when it is so much easier to throw money at an IT project ? After all, computers are magic, and everyone knows that the solution is always in a database.
Blech !
Nobody can "predict" server failure or hacking, that is why there exists a thing called a BACKUP.
Your "approach" was akin to building a house in a flood zone, then counting every year without a flood as a validation of your poor management skills.
Meanwhile, hard disk size has been continuously increasing and prices have been continuously dropping. Worst-case scenario for backups : take the server offline and plug in a bloody USB external disk. I'd wager they have some models with more disk space than the server.
I know hindsight is 20-20, but this is not a case of hindsight. Any admin worth his title knows that without a working backup, any server is just a victim waiting for its killer.
Well, you got yours now. You had six years to prepare for this, and you did nothing.
I don't feel sorry for you.
How long before somebody brings this to the European Court ? After all, our good ol' Euro deputies have basically just said that cutting people off without due process is illegal and shouldn't be done, right ?
And France is a major player in the Euro sphere, right ?
As usual, France makes itself look ridiculous without even trying.
And yes, I'm French too.
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