Posts by Pascal Monett 19061 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
So just like Lotus did with France then ?
More of the same. Frankly, with the incredible amount of terrorists that have been caught because of their mobile phone/Internet usage, I cannot help but think that this is all just a load of crock. Give us our 2048-bit encryption keys already, if the Government is snooping on me it has a lot more to do with RIAA then with Osama !
No, I don't trust them to fly the plane. I trust them to tell a human pilot where to fly the plane. I also trust all the land-based radar tracking stations to report on the plane's position, thereby ensuring that the low-power signals are indeed leading the pilot on the right course.
As for fiber security, obviously if you run the wires and fiber through the same path, cutting one will cut the other, duh. In a plane there are 4 cardinal points. I expect one technology to be routed through one point, and the other tech to be routed on the opposite side - but I'm no expert in avionics.
I guess WiFi might just be acceptable as a backup, but only if there is no electrical interference in the surrounding atmosphere. If your engine has blown up violently enough to shred the fuselage, you're a goner anyway, so I don't believe that WiFi would help in that situation. Again, I'm no expert in avionics, so maybe it is a good idea.
If you can't hack it with Excel and a VBA script, that is.
Children - especially below 15 - have no use knowing where I am. I'm at work, and they are at school.
Mobiles for any youngster below 15 is an excuse to waste money and worry uselessly, or to exert GPS surveillance on the kid.
A mobe only becomes useful when the sprog gets his first scooter. That is when he might actually need to make a phone call - when he runs out of gas, for instance.
I know why. DRM and unacceptable resource hogging are my two gripes.
Frankly, we are in the 3rd millennium now. Why does a new OS version have the right to use up even more resources than its predecessor ? If anything, it should use less, be more optimized and have a smaller footprint.
Of course, that would mean that MS stop throwing everything and the kitchen sink in the same package, and call it an "operating system". Windows has never been an Operating System, it's been an Encapsulated User Experience.
The second point that really gets my blood pressure rising is the embedded DRM. I simply cannot accept that an OS be rigged to decide what I can and cannot do with my hardware and software. An OS is supposed to do exactly what I want it to do, no questions and no fuss. I've been working with PCs long enough to not need a nanny behind the keyboard, thank you.
And please do not come beating the "better architecture" drum. Vista is based on x86 errors and as long as the kernel (the actual OS) is not entirely and 100% protected from tampering like in Linux, no amount of tinkering and backyard shortcuts will ever surmount the basic security issues that come with this historical cock-up of an architecture.
So Vista is and always will be out of the question for me.
That said, I can believe that Vista is quite an acceptable platform for companies that have the resources to splurge on it. It must surely be better from an admin standpoint (what with all the Big Brother attitude floating around these days, I'm sure its been extensively programmed for compliance), and I can accept that it is more secure (even though it strangely seems to have the same issues as XP does, although it was supposedly developed from scratch - cough).
Then again, companies most often have a competent IT department (more so than home users), with security products in place and monitored. Firewalls, network-monitoring AV packages, email malware-sniffers and so on. So I can't help thinking that anything Vista can bring is redundant, security-wise.
In that case, what's the use ? From a ROI point of view, I'm not convinced that companies are getting a good deal out of upgrading their hardware, fussing with software compliance and installing Vista. And I doubt that any company with Vista installed is going to retire the AV monitors, malware sniffers and other firewalls that are already in place.
So Vista is still a turkey, even in the enterprise environment.
But hey, we've got a three decade tradition of Microsoft research funded by companies, why stop now ?
Google's "ability" to provide anything depends solely on the people who lay down the pipes that allow Internet access.
Unless Google became an ISP while I wasn't paying attention, I fail to see why Google should be singularly congratulated for hosting a web service. Of course, Google can and should be congratulated for being successful, but not for being present on the Internet.
Be my guest, log in and put all your medical records online.
I look forward to viewing them in the article related to Google-security cockups. Who knows, you might become the poster child for demonstrating the evils of trusting a Net corporation that doesn't actually care about you.
We need a Google icon with horns.
I'm sick of this knee-jerk reaction whenever something "bad" happens - make a new law to cover it !
I'm totally certain that existing laws can effectively be called upon to deal out the justice that is deserved. A person communicated under a false pretense with another person and, through deceit and lies, brought the victim to kill herself.
There is no country in which this behavior is not morally reprehensible, and it's not because computers were involved that it is the first time such a thing has ever happened.
So I would like the lawyers to get a grip, go find the relevant cases and do their job properly.
We don't need new laws. I'm sure we already have way to many. And I'd like to see the ones we have properly enforced before some enlightened do-gooder drops another load on the seat of the already groaning Code of Law.
More accurately : how much they can mangle it.
In school, I was taught that a "dead" language was not spoken any more and thus, did not change, whereas a "living" language was used and changed over the course of time.
At that time, I was brought to think that having a living language is quite a good thing, adaptability and all that.
Unfortunately, along the way I learned one crucial fact about how a living language changes : it's because of all the mouth-breathers who can't be arsed to spell their own language correctly, and thus impose their repeated mistakes until said mistake gets its own place in the hallowed pages of a dictionary and becomes "part" of the language.
That irks me to no end.
How insulting and irresponsible.
That's like accusing a rape victim of being at fault for getting raped, except that for the rape victim the consequences are much worse.
We geeks resent that you paint yourself as being part of our enlightened community. Those who are enlightened educate those who are not, they do not belittle them.
Oh yeah ? Since when ?
It is still trivial to hack into a wireless router, and I've read that even so-called "secured" routers can be broken into by knowledgeable hackers.
As for stability, am I to understand that wireless is now just as reliable as a good ol' Ethernet cable ? No more trouble with walls or floors/ceilings ?
Somehow this "report" smacks a lot more of joyous/immature optimism than actual fact-finding and reporting.
Do any of the people who drafted this piece of wishful thinking have any experience in securing a wireless router ?
I don't think so.
Besides, if the NHS is anything to go by, the first guy to have his pacemaker hooked up to a wireless antenna will also be the first casualty of the scheme. I wouldn't trust those goons anywhere near me, that's for sure.
The merkins have a robot sentry that doesn't work, but they don't really have a need for it anyway. The South Koreans have a robot sentry line that doesn't work, but they don't actually need one either. Honestly, North Korea is just posturing and it would seem that no one is taking him seriously.
The Israelis have a robot sentry line, and they think they need it like they need to breath.
Is it any wonder which sentry line is actually working ?
I think not.
So, soldiers prefer killing their opponents "cleanly" as a . . professional courtesy ?
I don't think so. Today, warfare is waged on the principle of "overwhelming force". You assault your enemy when you're sure that you have 10 times whatever resources you need. You go in, and you blow anything that moves to smithereens to make sure it won't fire back.
And if they could just call in a precision airstrike and carpet bomb the area they would, but there's that nagging little problem called collateral damage which makes it not always possible.
It has nothing to do with any "I'll kill you cleanly if you kill me cleanly as well". It's a lot more "I'll blow your ass to Kingdom Come before you blow mine away".
It is simply amazing how some people do not understand the far-reaching effects of what this kind of product does. Personally, the fact that this company does indeed appear to be more honest than typical malware does not make them better.
Imagine this : a company asks you to let yourself be followed by a camera crew all day long, 24/7. You will even be recorded in your sleep. Anything that the camera picks up can be sold for profit to any number of TV channels, and you will gain nothing from it. Your life, even intimate, will be recorded whatever happens. Oh, they'll give you a motorcycle for all your troubles.
Would you accept such a contract ? I know I wouldn't.
Yet there are people who accept this for their surfing habits.
My mind is well and truly boggled.
On the other hand, what irony there is here. Scores of malware writers have tried to get this in under the radar, and are being foiled by every AV/anti-malware app out there. But these guys ? They're open and honest, and require that you blow your mind with reams of legalspeak before shackling you to the bench. Only after your explicit consent do they start whipping you until you bleed. And no AV vendor can go against it, because they are legal.
Isn't the perversity of it all simply beautiful ?
Personally, I think that given that we already have quad core and nothing to do with it all on a desktop, a radical redesign of the front side bus is required.
I don't think 24 cores is at all feasible if all 24 are plugged into the same 64-bit interconnect. Massive lag should probably occur at that point.
It looks like someone is going to have to design a multi-64 bit lane FSB to cope with the data streaming to/from the cores and the RAM/IO thingys.
And THAT will be a major engineering feat.
Maybe on-board SATA interconnect between each core and each peripheral ? Or are we going to see segmentation between cores - one group with HDD priority, one group with GPU priority, and the rest take whatever is left when available ?
The possibilities are endless, but plonking 24 cores on today's bus is a non-starter.
And before that (from 1985 forward), the megabyte was 1024 kilobytes and there was no MiB. Hard disk manufacturers initially labelled their disks in the proper byte notation, until some jerkoff thought of the scheme and invented some "Joe User" issue with the real byte.
Which is all irrelevant nowadays, but back in the day the megabyte was over $15, and getting stuffed for 7% was not a small deal.
Today, however, with 1024 megabytes coming in at pennies, it is really irrelevant to continue arguing about GBs and GiBs. I will remain true to the original GB, since gibbing is quite a different activity.
Gotta admit I rather agree. Frankly it is tiring to be titillated by the NSFW tag, only to see tiny plastic bosoms worth nothing to oogle over.
Please, could El Reg change that tag to something more appropriate, like NSFL, and keep the NSFW for real, honest-to-goodness bulgarian airbags (inflated or not) ?
Your figures demonstrate that China is getting there. I think that, in the next 20 years, it will be first in line.
The US, what with $120 billion of war debt, will be hard-pressed to keep up.
And it's not anonymous cowards who fling useless insults with ease that will do anything about it.
It's really interesting to follow the evolution of the industry in this domain. The impressiveness of the adaptability and ingenuity of the malware writers is only outdone by the sadness of their quest : to infect even more PCs with spam-sending filth.
It's kind of like meeting a psychopathic serial killer who is on the verge of discovering faster-than-light travel. You know he's good, but you have to kill him anyway.
Pity.
"exposing creative people to unjustified ridicule"
I daresay what with all the bull these "creative people" have been subjecting us to for the last quarter of a century, this little bit is hardly going to leave a dent in their hides which, by now, must be thicker than an elephant's.
And besides, I don't see that the version you report is any better. I think I'd actually prefer a dwarf star. Since they already take us for fools, they might as well go the whole nine yards.
I find it quite curious to see just how the perception of size has changed in the eye of the market. One is arguing about the "purity" of decimal, the other is bringing forth a difference between MB and MiB (a fan of Will Smith, perchance ?).
That's all nice and cute, but the facts are these :
At the beginning of the hard disk, manufacturers did indeed represent size in its proper power-of-2 base. 1024 is a kilobyte whether you like it or not, and a megabyte (MB, not MiB, which is term that came into being around Y2K and was probably invented to placate those who do not comprehend what MB actually stands for) is 1024 kilobytes (or KB, not KiB either).
One might argue that giving sizes in their proper base-2 format was confusing for the layman, but given the amount of hooplah that has been going on for the past eight years (and continues unabated) in the graphics arena around shaders, texels and megahertz, I seriously doubt the validity of that argument. Besides, the layman doesn't actually need to understand what the exact size of his storage is, all he needs to know is that he's getting more every year for less money.
Occam's razor states that the truth is much more simple : Seagate & Co discovered that they could twist the truth a bit and label their disk sizes in megabits or somesuch, thus implementing that wonderful "decimal purity" and, more importantly, cheating us out of an ever-growing proportion of what we should be getting.
And when you were buying the megabyte (so that there's no confusion) at over $10, the sensation of being cheated was a particularly expensive one.
Of course, given the price of storage today, I don't really mind any more. But I won't forget either.
Having a soldier transmitting all the time is akin to giving the enemy a location fix. Find enough in a given area and you're just begging for an artillery strike.
As for the glory of the Camerone battle, it is not because they lost - it's because they stuck together and resisted in spite of impossible odds. It's because they stood their ground and never gave up, never surrendered.
Yes, they knew they were going to die. They knew they were doomed. But they did not kneel and wait for the slaughter. They made the enemy pay dearly for the victory, and to a man, they fought to their last breath.
It is the heroic display of resistance and combat brotherhood that is celebrated, and rightly so. Because if you can remain trustworthy and steadfast when all is lost, then you can do so anywhere, anytime, under any conditions.
I would think that any soldier would understand that, and appreciate it.
OS numbers change, but the basic, hard-coded, fact-of-life reboot requirement has been there since Win95 and seems there to stay - even in 64-bit versions.
Methinks that, 200 years from now, Windows Eon 4 will be 4096-bit capable, manage 256 discreet processing units and 4 petabytes of RAM (forget disk space - everything will be RAM by that time), and still, every now and then, a popup will center on the screen, asking "Windows needs to reboot now. Please confirm." with a lonely OK button underneath.
And if you don't confirm in 25 seconds, it will anyway.
The oversized head that he has gained in no way makes him a businessman, much less a successful one.
He could conceivably qualify himself as a successful lobbyist, though.
But where culture is concerned, he needs quite a lot of educating before being able to tout himself as culturally knowledgeable. And given his stance on moderating, along with his penchant to change the odds in whatever way suits him, I seriously doubt that any forum presided by His Wackyness and buddies will have anything to bring to the public as far as Knowledge is concerned.
We will certainly find out what misguided female is accompanying him, but he needn't preside a forum for that - I'm sure there are a few rags available who'd be happy to publish a line on that subject. Maybe even a picture.
Like I care.
Wonderful justification, Google.
Based on my analysis, my IP is like my home address. I'll give it to you if I have to, but I expect you to be well-behaved enough to not come knocking without an invitation
Especially if you come to sell me something.
But this is all irrelevant anyway. In my hosts file, I have the major ad servers redirected to 127.0.0.1, and I use Firefox with Adblock.
Ads ? I used to see them.
Have fun with your cookies, Google.
Was undoubtedly obtained by making sure that every single bit variation of a given virus was counted as another threat. Which is a great idea when there are programs out there that can package you a malware suite based on one or a few selected virii and automagically include some minor variations - some of which can probably be parameter-based.
Ah, the wonderful value of the security market - you can pull any number out of thin air, nobody is going to take you to task to prove your figures, and nobody really knows what is going on anyway.
Except the criminals. They most likely know exactly how many virii of what kind they have sent out, and what the impact is.
Pity that they're never the ones answering the surveys.
Um, does that mean that, next time the fleet commander gives an order, the first thing that the empowered sailors will do is blog about it on the intra-fleet Wiki ?
I can see it now :
"Ooh, we've been ordered into battle !"
"OMG no !"
"FIRST POST !"
"Do you think we're going to still get Doctor House at sea ?"
"Yeah man, did you see last week's episode where he totally pwned that cop ?"
"That was great ! DrHouse rules !"
....
And I always thought that "empowering" sailors was done by giving them a mop and a bucket.
So American military send confidential, top-secret, highly-sensitive data to the first mail address that happens to vaguely sound like a legit one, and now we find that they also send classified nuclear hardware to non-approved destinations.
Sheesh, Patton would have a stroke over all these shenanigans, but before he'd personally hang the idiots responsible.
These things still happen today because :
1) managers view IT as a cost center, and any cost must be stamped on as hard as possible
2) managers today deem themselves able to program because they've written a few Excel macros, thus validating the "simply magical" idea Joe Public has ever had on how computers work, ergo whatever programming needed should be done by tomorrow morning because it's easy
3) security is a word that managers have never lookup up in a dictionary - along with maintainable, resilient and long-term
4) because of the three previous points, developers are always on a shoestring budget with very, very short deadlines, and testing is just confirming that the code you wrote does what you think it is supposed to do with the generic data you prepared for it
5) not to mention that not all developers have been properly trained on the language they are to use for the project (if at all)
6) the maintenance budget and the bug fixing budget are not the same as the development budget - sometimes even the managers are different (that should be referred to as "passing the buck beforehand")
I hope that clears that argument up. :-)
And it says it all. Twitter is not for important stuff that is worthy of a mail or a phone call to people you care for (and, hopefully, who care for you).
No, Twitter is the place you go to to tell everyone who can possibly be interested that you're going to have lunch/a coffee/take a dump.
How charming to think that there are people who have enough time on their hands to alert others to all these little things in their lives. And there are others with nothing better to do than read it.
Thank goodness they did say that "real life is what happens between email and phone calls".
Not to mention inane babbling about nothing interesting at all.
For the life of me, I cannot fathom why it is so important to some people to "document" their lives on this kind of stupidity.
I'll pass.
"A hallmark of what should be seen as a reasonable business practice is certainly whether or not the people engaging in that practice are willing to describe it publicly,"
I believe this declaration should go down in history as a textbook example of The Right Thing.
Especially now and especially in the USA, it is good to see that public officials can state things simply and clearly.
Now, of course, it remains to be seen whether or not this beautiful gem is going to actually be followed by proper action.
But hey, it's a politician that has SAID the right thing. It's a start !
Oh gosh, another multinational company accepting subsidies, then scampering off when there's none left. Like that never happened before.
Personally, I think there should be a, EU ban on subsidizing factory installations. The money is wasted anyway, since Nokia is only the last in a very long line of companies to have done this sort of thing. It's SOP now, people, for Pete's sake, they ALL do it.
So just stop giving them the money. If they say "Well we'll go elsewhere" then we can just answer "You will anyway, so get lost".
Besides, the whole thing really smacks of bribery to me, or maybe extortion is a more appropriate term. It's as if some guys in Armani suits cornered the mayor in the boardroom and beat the stuffing out of him until he "accepted" to pay them to install a factory. And, on leaving, one of them smiles and says "Nice to do business with you" while crushing the mayor's fingers under his heel.
Can't people understand that jobs "created" in such ways are nothing more than temp jobs ? That the state/region/city is simply paying unemployment fees under a different guise ?
How long are we going to continue putting up with this ?
The state should simply step in and say "Okay, you want to leave ? Fine, go. But the factory is seized and everything in it now belongs to the State. We'll use it as we see fit."
Okay, I've got to stop smoking the carpet now.
Yeah, that'll be really useful. Not.
The only solution to immigration issues is first, enforcing existing laws - which are never properly enforced due to political pussy-footing and lack of manpower, and second, putting enough manpower into the effort to make it work.
No amount of technology is going to miraculously solve illegal immigration. Footwork and experience are the only things that will.
Plus, as far as biometrics go, I don't see why I should give up all my details to some unsecure, unguaranteed foreign entity just because I decide to go there and spend part of my holidays.
Any country that requires my DNA before letting me in is going on my personal black list and will be removed from possible holiday destinations. They have no right or use to profile me, and I resent in advance any hassle that will arise because there is a mistake in their bloody database.
And mistakes there will be, given the track record of just about any government security process or IT project.
Why should my life be ruined because some stupid git mistakenly decided that my DNA somewhere was a security threat ? What defense do I have in a Gitmo cell ?
I frankly see no benefit to innocent people, and hardly a threat to terrorists.
Name me one terrorist that got caught because of his mobile phone.
Just one.
"they would be better off without our disgraceful american crap anyway"
Umm, if I'm not mistaken, they're the ones that make a fair share of that american crap. Them, Taiwan and soon India.
I'll be interested in your argument the day they decide to stop making american crap for america, and start making their own crap for themselves. The Northern hemisphere has been teaching the Southern one to make their stuff for decades, it's only a matter of time before the South starts going it alone.
There is going to be a big shift in the coming years, where our current, well-known monopolists are going to find their feet cut out from under them by new and upcoming monopolists in a foreign tongue. And that has already started in the automobile industry.
As it always has.
The more I hear of Ebay, the less I feel like checking it out.
And Paypal doesn't make me feel better about the whole deal.
Now, sellers can't criticize scam buyers any more, and small-time sellers are being pushed out.
Once upon a time, Ebay held some interest in that it was a place for Joe Anybody to buy and sell stuff from other Joes. Now Ebay is just another white-collar Wallmart outlet. No interest here, people, move along.
I live in Europe, where I have been often told that anyone can have my bank account number - the only thing they can do with it is give me money.
I understand that the sorry situation in the Land Of The Formerly Known As Free makes it so that if the Social Security Number, or the bank account number, fall into the wrong hands, the person is up the creek without a paddle, but do I risk the same thing in Europe ?
Especially given the fact that the notion of credit rating has nothing to do with what is practiced in the US, what are my risks ? Because I have been noticing that spam has increasingly been present in my native language in my mailbox. It used to be that anything in English not from a friend I knew I could confidently delete without a thought - all the important stuff I got was normally not in English.
But now my mail is polluted with spam that is not in English. Heck, I have been receiving spam in four languages now ! And that makes it a bit more tricky (not much, though) to get rid of the stuff easily.
I know this will get worse before it gets better (hmm, will it ever actually get better ?), so I am wondering : what is the risk to me ?
From a PC-centric standpoint, that is certainly the truth. Unfortunately, Microsoft is not helping this with its attempt to interface PC and Xbox users on the same server.
Take Universe At War, for example. I was interested in this game, despite the faults it outlines for the single-player version. Unfortunately for Petroglyph and Microsoft, I learned that, in order to play it online, I had to subscribe to the Live service at the tune of $50 a month.
Say what ? Me, a PC user, is supposed to PAY to play a game online ? What on Earth are they smoking in Redmondia ?
Too bad for Petroglyph, I won't buy their game in these conditions.
Free Internet gaming is the founding cornerstone of multiplayer gaming nowadays, there is strictly no reason for me to go pay to play for an average, if interesting, RTS, when I can play Supreme Commander or a host of other good ones online for nothing.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
I understand that Microsoft wants to have its Live service pay for itself, but once again it is simply demonstrating that it understands nothing about the Internet.
Not a thing.
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