Posts by Pascal Monett 19394 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Microsoft only complains that "one company" holds the cards when that company ain't Microsoft. It means that Microsoft is pissed that they are not the ones calling the shots. It also means that Microsoft will show great eagerness in getting its bloody hands on the specs in order to "enhance" them with proprietary plug-ins which will "encourage" developers to use the Microsoft version and none other.
Oh we know the drill all right, and God are we tired of it.
You forgot just one thing : China is respected as a member of the international community based on two things only : first, it can field an army of more men than most countries have people, and second, it has limitless market potential for capitalist money-grubbing CEO's to drool over.
Being respectful of people's rights has never been a criteria and probably never will be.
The usual Microsoft gumption is at work here. Judge you by your deeds indeed, do you think we've waited for your permission ? Do you think your track record is such a shining, spotless testament to your belief in Open Source ?
In case you might have missed it, Ballmer, we still remember the fact that you are a convicted monopolist, despite all those things Gates claimed to not remember. And we will never forget the hugely reported trial against Linux, which was really a perfect demonstration of your "commitment" to Open Source. By the way, Steve, have you ever actually published the 200+ infringements that you based your trial on ? I mean, apart from the one so poorly disguised by hiding it in another font ?
So, just to make it perfectly clear, Monkey Boy, your track record reads like a pimps' criminial record. Abuse (of customers and vendors), battery (of the judicial system), corporate misdoings (company takeovers just to kill a product), money laundering (i.e. tax evasion) and practically every crime we have a law for (metaphorically speaking), they're all in your record.
And we will never forget that.
I feel that this article outlines quite clearly the major issues that exist with "cloud service" operators. For me, my opinion of cloudy stuff is simple : banks and major multinational corporations will never allow their internal data to be hosted by someone else.
Ergo, without the boost and credibility that these key organizations give, this whole cloud thing will never really take off, or else will remain at the "host your mail and 100GB of data" level that it is today.
I can understand Phorm, I can understand private companies doing anything to make another buck and waiting for the backlash to tone things down. It's a stupid policy, but I can understand it. For the life of me though, I cannot understand that a public service, government-owned and government funded, without any commercial obligation, stoops to that kind of petty thievery. Where does this tendency come from ? What is it with civil servants these days ? Who in their right mind can possibly think that opt-out is the morally proper way to do things ? I can't get it. I just can't.
No really, how many times have we heard of this kind of nonsense. Vendor's product has issue, questions posted on vendor forum, posts deleted.
Customer Relations 101 reminder : deleting questions without explanation will invariably bring the issue under greater scrutiny and will, without fail, put the vendor in bad light in the opinion of the public.
Happens every time. No exceptions.
Why oh why do these companies still try ?
I look forward to seeing a police car hurry to a location, stop with screeching tires and four cops popping out to look for a victim who is actually 100 yards away around the corner, bleeding on the ground next to a little bunch of plastic pieces that may have been a phone.
Because he made the admins in the US military look like the idiots they are, and for that reason he has to be put away and made to break rocks to atone for the horrible, terrible deed. That is 99% of the damages cited. The rest is just the time it took to slap one of those admins until proper passwords got set.
I heartily agree. I see objects shuffling around every day at the office. They have very good sensors (high-tech ones called eyes and ears), but they seem blissfully unaware of anything.
As long as the coffeepot is not empty, that is.
So they're gone . . to better serve their customers ?
That must be something like the local Triad gangster changing the "ownership" of his restaurant three times in the last five years - with the same personnel, the same crappy list of dishes, but a different decor each time.
And the Income Tax guys get fooled every time.
Get with the progam, mister. You need it because we say so. And when you get wristwatches with 2048x1600 pixels, we'll make sure it has a Blu-Ray drive so you can watch you favorite space opera while getting a cramp in your arm.
Now go and pay your voluntary contribution to the Save The RIAA fund. If you don't know where to go, don't worry, a friendly RIAA SWAT team is waiting just around the corner with a lawyer to "serve" you.
Yeah sure. Funny how that argument is totally ignored when it comes to cigarettes, alcohol, guns, Wall Street, genetically-modified organisms and a bunch of other subjects that have been proven to be dangerous in given circumstances.
I am seriously tired of this game of switch-to-the-argument-that-suits-us-best that these politicians play nonstop.
I would like a global policy put in place : choose a line of conduct and STICK TO IT. If you are worried about long-term effects of one thing (as well you should be), then take that perspective into account in ALL other aspects of your mandate.
Politics would be a lot simpler if each subject had a checklist with the same items :
- is it a global issue ?
- is it financially important ?
- is it socially important ?
- is it economically feasible ?
- is it socially acceptable ?
- is it morally acceptable ?
- will there be any short-term benefits ?
- will there be any long-term benefits ?
- what will the short term cost be ?
- what will the long term cost be ?
Go through the list publicly, each time, and validate the answers with experts AND the public.
The day that happens we'll all be one big step closer to democracy.
Curious how (supposed) Linux users are all over the comments on Windows articles. One would think they have other things to do with a such a wonderful system than waste time reading articles about an inferior OS.
I'm a Windows user because Linux (any flavor) doesn't suit my needs. Yes, Capito, you read that right : neither Ubuntu nor any other Tux flavor does what I want to do, so I (shock) don't use it.
But you don't see me banging on about Windows in a Linux article. Nor do I see any other comments about Windows in Linux articles.
Oh wait . . there aren't any Linux articles, and Linux is insignificant, market-wise. I wonder if there may be a correlation there.
I don't know if it's true, and Kaspersky's track record on this issue does not exactly incite me to believe them, but one hour does seem a bit short.
I would think that a proper response time would be at least two working days.
On one hand, leaving such a hole open for more than two days does seem rather slack, but on the other, one hour is surely not enough to evaluate the risk, test its veracity and do something about it.
Are you aware that all that money is chump change to him ?
Sure he gives a lot, and of course it's a good thing. Never forget, though, that he has reaped a million times what he gives from the gouging he gave the market.
In my view, the only thing he's doing is buying himself some respectability.
And what's your solution, Judge Know-It-All ? Have you ruled that all Internet users must be uniquely identified in a reliable way ? No, because it's impossible to enforce that rule. So you just shove the problem to a website and be done with it. Shoot the messenger, how convenient.
My guess is that you should have ruled that convicted sex offenders should be constrained to either not have Internet access, or submit to a perpetual search order that ensures that anything they do from their home connection is recorded for surveillance issues. But you didn't do that either because it probably violates Human Rights or something. Much easier to put the burden on a website and blame them when they cannot do the impossible.
Epic Fail.
Banning people who are banned from working with children from banning moderators who are banned from working with children. Let's just cut to the chase and put people banned from working with children in a detainment center so that we're sure they'll never see a child again. Looks like Guantanamo ain't gonna be closing any time soon.
Adults should not "befriend" children.
Adults have the responsibility of protecting children and educating them, not being friends with them.
It is a sickness of today's society that adults consider having to be friends with children. Becoming a friend is often viewed as facilitating communication. Unfortunately the opposite is true : if the adult becomes a friend, he loses authority and his views become dismissable.
Adults online have absolutely zero reason to try and get the phone or address of a child. I'm going to be totally, shockingly politically incorrect here and say that, outside of family ties, adults should have zero interest in other kids. Beyond polite enquiry to a parent about his health and scholarship status, a normal adult should not devote any more interest in a child that is not part of his family or his best friends' family.
And I'll even go one step further and say that, outside of security or behavioral issues, an adult should not even speak to a child he does not know and that has not been presented to him by someone who he does know that has some family tie with the child.
Of course, online it is sometimes a bit more difficult to find out who you're talking with, but a child will undoubtedly give himself away at some point by using some school expression or other construct that an adult would not use. At that point, an adult should be aware of the situation and behave accordingly in any future correspondence.
Children need to be friends with children, not with adults. Children need to make their own mistakes and understand their own lessons, which is something they cannot do with an adult because, by default, an adult "knows". There is no room for a child to experiment life with someone who already knows about it.
Without going back to the old days when children were considered well behaved if they never opened their mouth and sat still, we need to learn to guide children without either lording over them nor doting on them. Which also implies that we all need to become proper, responsible adults. Maybe that last bit is also part of the problem.
Let me see if this rings any bells : a guy finds his way into a foreign governments' military IT structure, extracts data and sells it off. This obviously has nothing in common with another guy purposely hacking into a foreign governments' military IT structure to find if UFOs exist or not without selling anything to anyone afterwards.
So, if that other guy is supposed to be extradited and brought to trial in said foreign country because of the horrendous damage he did, then this guy might as well hang himself now and be done with it.
No ?
I am reading more and more about how companies balk at replacing an OS that works for them. And you have to ask : just what gives MS the right to EOL an OS ? Be it XP or Windows 3.11, Microsoft has convinced millions of businesses to put their operating life on the Windows line. And all of a sudden (okay, not so suddenly, but still) they show up and say "Oh, by the way, we're not supporting this version any more. Upgrade or you're screwed".
I may be weird, but it seems to me that if a business says "We're keeping this version, it's your duty to support us", then MS should not have a choice.
I find it curious that a software company can dictate an upgrade cycle worth trillions to millions of business customers. And the failure of Vista is a really tell-tale sign that businesses are wising up to the fact.
An OS is nothing but an enabler for applications to use system resources, end of story. The only reason one should have to upgrade the OS is stay current on hardware improvements, not to get a shiny new UI with a DRM infestation.
In an ideal world, a UI would be an add-on downloaded from the Net, not a core part of the OS. The OS does not need a UI to function, and the existence of a UI should not determine anything else but how the user interacts with the applications at his disposal.
Gosh, I feel like I just described a Unix environment. Must be growing a beard.
I'm not interested in FS - every version I ever looked at seemed to me to be more sluggish and demanding than the last. I never found any trace of the use of DirectX either - as if the render engine was on CPU mode.
No really, FS is and always has been a turd as far as performance goes.
But whenever I go to a store and check out the game section, I see FS add-ons by the dozens. All kinds, for all tastes, I imagine. That has to mean success, no doubt about it.
And they kill it off, just like that ? Hey Monkey Boy, you're bleeding money with every XBox and Vista is a big gaping hole in your pocketbook, and you kill off something that is bringing in money by the truckload ?
Good Lord, I should be chairman of MS. No way I can screw things up worse than you, Ballmer.
No way.
The countdown has started. Gears of War is a time bomb waiting to happen. One day, in five years or in fifty, someone is going to want to run it for old time's sake, and they'll be screwed.
Might as well get used to it people, you never actually buy software anymore, you just rent it. If you're lucky, your lease is for longer than your interest in the game.
Some companies still have enough honor not to saddle you with ticking killers like that. Blizzard, for example, is one company I very much doubt will ever do such a thing. But Blizzard is one of a kind.
I wonder how many of the games I have contain this hidden kill switch that makes my purchase worthless ?
Win7 being Vista under a slightly different disguise, I fail to see how much better its adoption will be in the business market. It will have the same steep hardware requirements, will be just as difficult with existing applications, and will bring nothing practical in exchange. And it comes with DRM Inside. Beurk !
I might very well try Win7 one day. On the spare test PC I have at work. Just for kicks. But at home, my gaming rig will stay XP until it won't run the latest hardware any more. And when that happens, I'll freeze my hardware spending until I find a suitable OS replacement - that does not include DRM.
Get one thing clear, Ballmer : it is MY PC. You have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or cannot do on it, and you have no right to try.
Not to be contradictory or anything, but I have the distinct feeling that it's a sight more difficult to get something installed on a phone than it is to get something installed on a PC.
PC's are just begging to have stuff installed, and there are still loopholes that canget stuff installed without even knowing it.
I don't see phones having the same issues - at least, no phone that doesn't have a Windows interface. If it's a Microsoft-driven phone, then sorry, but all bets are off.
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.
