Posts by Pascal Monett 19056 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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 !
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.
"Administrators already have full access to the machine so there's nothing for them to exploit."
Uh, sorry, but I think that since they are Admins of the machine, any exploit they attempt to use will obviously succeed.
So it's not "there's nothing for them to exploit", but more like "there's nothing to protect them from an exploit".
And you're going to contact them again this week, and next week, and the week after that.
What makes you think that you're going to get more of an answer than the thousands who have already tried ?
Because you're a company using their service ?
Pah !
You're nothing to PayPal. PayPal doesn't care about you, PayPal doesn't care about anything except creaming a share off of every transaction it can get, on both sides.
And if you complain, you'll just get your account frozen.
That is the PayPal way of doing business and handling complaints.
Uh, SCO is not funny.
At least, not unless you happen to think that the schizophrenic bridesmaid who thinks she's the bride at a marriage is funny.
What I call funny is Nvidia's repeated attempts at denying issues and cheating, spreading rumors and spewing baseless FUD that invariably come back to bite them in the rear.
ATI cheats too, of course, it's business as usual.
Meanwhile, and perhaps despite all that, PCs get more powerful every year.
That is funny.
SCO is just pathetic.
Given the reasons already outlined here and elsewhere, I believe there is only one solution for those who do not indulge in piracy : set up a server that records all traffic between your computer network and your Internet connection. Have it certified by a notary and have a proper backup procedure for the activity logs.
The day you get your first notice of copyright infringement, respond with a lawsuit for slander or something similar based on your activity logs.
Do not accept any deal - go to trial and PROVE that they cannot prove their allegations, ergo, the law is unjust and should therefor be repealed.
Let's get this ball rolling people - for the sake of all the innocent people who will be cut off because of baseless accusations.
I want to know what the inertial force of this toolbag is.
More to the point, I want to know just how fast that grease gun is going and whether or not it stands a chance of punching a hole through the side of a satellite or the window of the Shuttle in future orbits.
And how long will it take for the lost items to become shootings stars ? The Shuttle works in low Earth orbit if I'm not mistaken - anything that has mass and no means of maintaining its orbit will plunge back down to the surface in due time. So how long for this bag ?
Kudos to the ship commander for upholding a long-standing naval tradition in the proper manner and giving the pirates an honest chance to turn themselves in.
And I fully approve of sinking pirate ships, be they motherships or speedboats.
However, even though the thought of eradicating piracy with extreme prejudice makes no never mind to me, it must be said that maybe, just maybe, if we tackled the root of the problem (ie the desperation that drives these men to piracy in the first place) and allowed or even encouraged third-world nations to have a proper economy and become stable and prosperous, then perhaps these problems would go away by themselves ?
If a man has a choice between a legal job that sustains himself and his family, and an illegal, life-threatening "job" that does much better, I believe most men will choose the legal job with relief, and leave the illegal one to the rabid nutters.
When rabid nutters are the only ones left doing piracy on the high seas, THEN we can blow out of the water on sight without remorse.
Meanwhile, could the other warships in the zone at least do things the Indian way ?
My memories on the how and when are shady, but if I recall properly Microsoft was trying to get user approval of its newest security thingamajig with a user beta.
I had installed the beta, and was not disappointed with it. As has been said elsewhere, one security product is never enough - although I won't go up to five, another free checker is generally a good thing for the market.
Then one thing happened that I will never forget : Microsoft acquired this shady company whose product was listed as a critical security risk in the beta - and in less than a week that company's product risk rating was elevated from Critical to something like Mildly Offensive.
Sorry, Microsoft, but that is NOT how you do security.
Conflict of interest and marketing concerns do not a security product make.
In my mind, that is the one point that buried OneCare for all eternity.
Because of that, I will never be able to trust OneCare or any other Microsoft offering concerning security.
You mean to say that you have no idea of what exactly "privacy" covers ?
Such as the right to live your life without being subjected to unlawful surveillance or inquiry outside of the due process of the law ?
Such as the right to not be required to state who you are or what you intend to do in any public area without being presented a proper warrant by an official representative of the law operating in an official capacity ?
Such as the right to lead your life as you intend to without being questioned about it unless your acts can be perceived as unlawful ?
Or the right to not be arrested if you have done nothing wrong ?
It is sadly amazing that people today are so divorced from their own civilization that they have to actually ask these questions.
Of course, I understand that these people still have to talk to each other every day for a while yet, but I doubt that any of the shareholders partake in this rosy view of Yang's involvement at the head of Yahoo!.
Sounds a lot like Dubya's endorsement of the "great job" that the other numbskull did in New Orleans.
It's just that they don't always have the real-time morphing/fixing/sound better hardware available with the proper settings for every song in the trailer.
Because nearly none of them are actually "singers", i.e. people who can sing their own songs without instrumentation and not not only not be thoroughly ridiculous but also be heard by all the people in the room.
Today's "singers" are more along the line of "performers" - they "perform" the act of singing like a prostitute "performs" love. Some of them even mix the two to a certain extent.
I used to be quite impressed by the concept of "living language" as opposed to a dead one. I always thought that a living language was a wonderful thing.
Until I got an Internet connection.
At that point I realized that the wonderful changing property of a living language is simply due to the overwhelming numbers of the uneducated masses that mangle parts of it so consistently that it becomes a new part of the language.
Like astronauts drinking their own piss, it really erases the glory from the notion.
Links on the Intarweb have nothing to do with accuracy. Putting a link on one's site does not mean the target URL is accurate, it simply means that the site owner believes that the linked site could interest his readers as well.
Supposing defamation because of a removed link goes straight to the "worst excuse ever" box of sad excuses for a lawsuit.
I don't think this one will fly in a court, especially if Wikileaks did nothing to trumpet the fact that it got linked in the first place.
AVG fan from v5 to v7. It was small, efficient, and very discreet. I liked it.
Then they changed direction and implemented the nagware update to 7.5, and I dropped it for COMODO.
Tell me once that you've got a selling version, fine. Tell me twice and give me an ignore option, fine. Tell me every time I boot and I can't ignore it and you're hitting the road, bud.
Looks like I was right, too.
Has he gone stark bonking mad ?
Is he actually trying to convince people that imposing the same market conditions on Open software as there is already on Closed software is Good Thing ?
At the very least, what he says indicates that Sun will stop at nothing to alienate itself from its user base. At the worst, he needs to see a shrink, or remove himself from the gene pool.
Ads in Open software. Why not include some DRM while he's at it ?
Given that Google has 80% of the online search ad market, there is no one but Google that can stifle competition in that market.
I'm all for a good MS-bash on a daily schedule, but if you want to bash them on this subject, stifling competition is hardly the way to go.
No really. Reading the rebuttal from the Court is a laugh at every sentence.
It is eminently clear that a brick is a brick, and the Court stated clearly that making it purple didn't change that fact. Good on them for sticking to essentials
Thank $Deity that there is at least ONE official body that still has a brain and uses it. The Patent Office would do well to thoroughly analyze the situation and derive a few consequences.
Make no mistake, I was brought up on LEGO bricks, and I have long lost the ability to count the days and weeks of my life that were devoted to assembling things with the various pieces, disassembling the results, starting over again and so on. Lego, the brick, will always have a special place in my heart.
But the company has lost it in that attempt. Besides, who doesn't know what a lego is ? Their's is a pointless endevour that fully merits its loser status.
But sad that a grown man can let his family life go to the dogs because he puts a higher priority on blagging about washing his dog.
As far as I'm concerned, someone who can't let his thoughts stray from the plastic toy he's got in his hand is someone who certainly cannot be asked to pay attention to the world around him, much less do investigative journalism about it.
Think about it for a second : a plastic toy in hand, for an adult.
Yep, it's exactly what it looks like.
I would suppose that the Marines started their approach of the game by implementing the same tactics and behavior that they use in real life, meaning keep your head down, save your ammo, short bursts and all that. The Marines are professionals, and approached the matches by identifying primary and secondary targets, setting their well-known tactics in place and following them religiously.
Whereas the geeks went for a par the course game, guns blazing, bunny-hopping and grenading like mad, running willy-nilly all over the place without care for tactics or strategy, jumping in the middle of Marine squads with a detpack to take 'em all out and up the kill count, no matter that they die in the process.
So I am not surprised to learn that the Marines had it a bit hard in the beginning, nor am I surprised to learn that they eventually evened out the score.
As the matches progressed, the Marines certainly learned that, in the game, the geeks do wierd, even stupid things that no sane soldier would ever dream of trying in RL, and adapted their mindset to it. They most probably had lots of fun gunning down the bunny hoppers, like any sane person would. In the end, they evened it out because teamwork and strategy will win over l33t solo skllz any day, and the Marines KNOW teamwork.
The geeks don't, and most likely never will for the most part given the society we live in today.
So yeah, it must have been lots of fun all around, and lets not get all hot and bothered over a few snide comments on either side. Let the geeks think they actually won. Nobody ever looks at the death score, only the kill score counts.
I play a lot of shooters, my current favorite is BF2. It's fun, but if there is one thing to learn from these games, it's that a battlefield is murder, pure and simple, and Justice is on holiday far away. While I have fun shooting pixels and gunning bots or other players, I always realize that, were this a real battle, my life would be hanging by a thread like everyone else's.
It is a frightening thought.
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