Posts by Pascal Monett

IBM: Dinosaurs were green

Re:Redundancy...

People have forgotten how mainframes work. The vast majority of today's PC users are most probably ignorant of what mainframes even are.

A PC is motley collection of basic hardware components. Its advantage is that it is easy to make components for it, which is why the hardware industry is wallowing in innovation. PCs are used for single tasks most of the time, and the user can generally not be bothered by knowing what is actually going on in the thing.

A mainframe is a delicate, precise assemblage of components tailored specifically to suit much more demanding hardware specifications. Mainframes can warn you in advance if just about any one of their components is going to fail - so you can replace it before it dies. Mainframes generally allow you to unload and switch off the area you do maintenance in, so that you do not need to shut down the mainframe to replace a component (ever heard of hot-swappable ?). With RAID, PCs have come to learn what hot-swappable is in the disc arena (but not users). Mainframes can do that with just about anything but the backplane (a motherboard, in other words).

In other words, I'm sorry to destroy your illusions but when the 3900 PCs are turned off, the few mainframes will easily take up the position and you're going to wait a long, loooong time before getting a day off because one of the mainframes went down. If it is competently managed, you might never see it be down during your entire career.

3D handset hits streets of Japan

I wonder

How many of those slim thingys will be broken in two by being put in a rear pocket and sat upon a few minutes later ?

Sony faces case for 'Cell' patent infringement

Can't be whacked by IBM or Sony

But I'll bet they can very well be whacked by my friend Joey Scaglione. I'll contact him for you if you wish - his prices are very reasonable and the job is always well done.

;-)

Facebook security glitch exposes user in-boxes

Well, one thing's for sure

SOME people did not increase their productivity with this Facebook issue !

Intelligent Finance upgrade downs web service

Two days is a problem ?

I dare say that a two day outage on online service is most certainly NOT a problem. If you have something so urgent that 48 hours is an unacceptable delay, then visit a local branch and talk to the teller - that's what he is for.

If you are too lazy to get off your fat rear and move a thousand yards, then don't whine about two days without service. And if your retort is that the local branch is far, then my answer is that if your banking service is sooo important to you, then move closer to the local branch.

Pascal.

Linkedin spurns bug bounty hunter

"its users, many of whom are high-net worth individuals, were put at a higher risk"

Hmm, that phrase makes the whole thing stink of the "these are rich, important people, so the problem is more important" mentality.

As a member of the LinkedIn community invited by three different people, I am thus a potential victim of the bug, whatever it is. As an aside, I rather hate these social network sites that rely on the personal relations of their users to increase their importance. I would never have joined LinkedIn on my own, but because three different people I know and am sympathetic with invited me, I had to respond and sign in (otherwise, you know, they might take it the wrong way - business relations and all that).

Now there is a bug. Well that hardly surprises me, which is why I filled out the bare minimum in my profile. There is nothing there that I mind if it gets out because it is already public information.

I do not trust any site with personal information, not even my email. I think it is inevitable that sites be cracked at one point or another (and success increases the likelihood of being a target), so why feed the monster ?

ICSTIS wants your views on anonymous SMS

No to anonymous SMS

I'm already mighty miffed that, despite the fact that I turned off receiving ads, I still get promotional drivel from my operator. So I am REALLY NOT interested in getting yet more inane babble from some entity I'm not even sure I know.

UK gov offers car CO₂ rankings by class

New cars are better

Whatever the emission level of the new car you chose, it will most likely be anyway better than the 5-year-old car you have now. Constant improvements are made on engines and combustion technology, and five years is enough to see them come to market.

So, if you really are green, either find a way to not need a car, or renew your vehicle in less than seven years. Anyone who keeps a car for more than that should not tout any green credentials as far as motoring is concerned.

Of course, if you're one of the oafs that has a spotless, shiny 4x4, then this whole article and comment thread is useless to you anyway.

MIT in Matrix 'Crowd Farm' plan

I'm with Jon Tocker

And Daniel Ballado-Torres and LaeMi Qian. Such a scheme is totally unfeasible, technically speaking.

And I am quite glad that this nonsense is being brought to light. I believe it is time to give MIT an Iggy award.

California e-voting machines have more holes than Swiss cheese

unrealistic worst case scenario ?

Just exactly what is unrealistic in imagining someone "subverting" the server before installing a logging application ?

Just what is unrealistic in imagining an agent training himself in unscrewing the lid to insert some tampering device and rescrewing the lid on in record time ? He wouldn't have to be all that quick either - there is no time limit on voting, and no one will dare open the privacy screen in less than five minutes, especially not if you talk back and state you're having trouble deciding.

I find all these tests quite realistic, and I despise the current state of electronic voting machine technology. If you make a machine to count my vote, you had better prove to me that it is totally secure from tampering, and I mean totally. And that rules out using Windows to run it for starters.

By the way, I don't know about all of Europe, but in France we don't have machines to vote. It's the good ol' paper ballot in the voting urn, and it works fine. There was a trial of a few machines for the Presidential vote that brought Sarkozy to power - but it was badly timed for a first try and generally not appreciated by the public. No word on efficiency or security, although a few civil rights organizations declared that they were unsafe and unfit for duty.

I don't suppose that'll be enough to keep the machines from coming, though.

MS-DOS paternity suit settled

Not that I do this often

but I really feel that this quote is relevant (Mark 12:41-44) :

And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much.

And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing.

And he called his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury:

For all did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, all her living.

Now then, what is this I hear about Bill G being a Good Man ?

Bush to Congress: streamline star-chamber spy court

Isn't it wonderful ?

To see just how a robust democracy, stalwart defender of Human Rights, stands up to defend those values in a time of hardship ?

Yes, it would be nice to see that. Unfortunately, that is nowhere to be seen at the moment.

I viewed V for Vendetta just last night, and I was shocked at how relevant the film is to the current events.

Of course, it was made in 2005, but it is based on a comic book character (hey, another Marvel creation goes to the silver screen) that predates the film by decades.

Basically put, I feel that this film accurately portrays a possible future that I would prefer did not happen. But the way Bush and his cronies are going, it seems all too possible.

IBM: technology will ease travel woes

Another thing missing

Any word on British trains being able to successfully navigate after a bit of snow, or maybe even some wet leaves, have fallen on (or near) a track ?

Is there any technology available for that ?

Right. As they say, I'll get my coat.

New tool enables loading of unsigned drivers in Vista

In short then,

Basically Atsiv is the nail in the coffin of whatever stability and security Vista could actually hope to have.

Congratulations, guys. You have officially killed a Moon launch worth of code. Now that you've driven Vista down to Windows Me level, can you do anything about killing the DRM infestation and overreaching tendency that Vista has to phone home ?

Council worker develops PC energy-saving program

People, people, we're talking about a Council !

It's news because it's a CIVIL SERVANT who has finally actually used his brain for something USEFUL !

I fail to understand why the common, hard-working grunt is not dancing in the streets with joy. It's part of the Government that has not only discovered a useful bit of tech - even one lying around in the dust for a decade now - but has even had the balls to go and implement a use for it that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Not only that, but this new functionality is going to actually SAVE MONEY ! Isn't that a revolution in itself ? Hey, Asmodeus, better do a quick temperature check down there - methinks you might have a snowball or two surviving.

Europe's floods and fires snapped from space

High-level view is beautiful

Must have been awesome to see the impact of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs - from the Moon, that is. I can just imagine the beautiful symmetry of the halo around Ground Zero, expanding in a wonderfully linear progression under the pumes of crust and mantle rising lazily in the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, on the ground, millions of creatures were being blasted by mega-hurricane winds of searing hot air that made the pyroclastic flows of Mt Vesuvius seem like a friendly garden barbecue, or being mashed to pulp by earthquakes of a magnitude that the Richter scale cannot even begin to describe.

It's all a question of scale, of course. A supernova is quite nice when you're a few thousand light-years away, but it's Armageddon for any planet orbiting the thing.

ICANN opens registrar reform up to public comment

Reform ICANN ? Cool !

Let's start by making ICANN actually respect its charter. You know, like not allowing a tender to be pre-awarded to Verisign despite the fact that many organizations decried the move and the decision was not based on established procedure.

Public comment on registrar reform. Yeah sure. We'll comment all we want, then ICANN will just go ahead and do as it pleases - like it's been doing since the dawn of the Internet.

I trust Twomey's dedication to transparency and democracy in ICANN dealings just a slight bit more than I trust Dubya's dedication to the same concerning the US government.

If you don't have an electron microscope, don't bother measuring.

The search for alien life

@Andy Bright

I was incensed by your comment right up to the point where you said "It would be a great joke to play on the creationists". Now I agree totally with you. So, where do I sign up ?

Intel responds to EU's anti-trust statement

Microsoft got raked over the coal ?

Oh did it ? Is that actually the impression that is left from all the frothing and hot air around the DoD vs MS case ?

Well it's a sad thing if it is, because as far as raking is concerned, Microsoft probably feels it mostly got a nice little back-scratch. I'll bet a lot of companies would have liked to get the treatment MS got from such a high-profile case which dwindled to not much after the DoD emasculated itself in its decisions.

With all the posturing, FUD and outright lies that MS lawyers gave at the proceedings, one would have thought that the judge would have ordered 50 lashings for everyone and a total breakdown of the company. Instead, MS was ordered to set up an internal review department and was left to its own devices while pretending to listen to the DoD.

Raked over the coals ? I think not.

GPL whiz Moglen nails Web 2.0 O'Reilly on 'frivolous' charges

@Connor Garvey

So you weren't there and you don't even care, but you still guess that one party was "childish" and "unprofessional" ? How about checking a transcript or catching a retransmission before venturing an unfounded opinion ?

I guess "objectivity" is a dying resource.

Microsoft rigs Live Search traffic

"using real people as the automatons"

Isn't that what politicians do every few years ?

Sharks in the soup, says conservation group

Re: Gore's party

"sharks are biologically important scavengers in the marine ecosystem"

Well yes, and politicians are biologically important scavengers in the clueless ecosystem.

The relation is clear to me.

;-)

Yahoo! buys Indian ad firm

@jonathan

Indeed, standards are falling in the summer season.

tsk, tsk. What a pity.

US cons attempt copyright-based prison break

Something I'm missing here

Aren't these guys in prison ? How did they get in contact with the FBI guy, by posting a notice on the Web ?

Aren't prisoners supposed to be shut off from society during their term, or am I just thinking like last century ?

I'm all for reintegrating prisoners into society - else they'll just end up back in prison (happens a lot anyway from what I hear) - but when they are in jail their communications with outside should really be controlled better.

Moving mobile numbers should be instant

@Nick Ryan

As someone who is just over 40, I take exception to your argument. I agree that many people that are advanced in their years do have trouble grasping the complexity of computers, internet and mobile phones, but it might do you good to realize that many people "just above 40" today are responsible for your ability to make that gratuitous comment.

Don't knock your elders, grasshopper, among them is the one that changed your diapers.

UK planespotters to battle al-Qaeda

@Andy Bright

Spot on there, chum. I like your way of thinking.

I hope this security craze will pass, especially since I don't see any ACTUAL security in any of the proposals made since 9/11.

Seriously, if we want to be sure our airports are secure, all we need to do is ask El Al. That airline is Israel-based, and I don't remember hearing about a hijacked El Al plane since about a quarter of a century.

Yet Israel is right in enemy territory, and there is no shortage of towel-heads in the area.

They must be doing something right, and I bet it doesn't have much to do with parking distance.

Why don't we send a study group over to El Al and check what they're doing ? Why are we content with screening baby bottles and refusing kiddie scissors ?

If we're supposed to be scared of terrorism, then I want REAL security, not just impolite security personnel prone to giving your back end a finger check.

Second Life gets its first copyright law suit

PayPal is not a bank

A bank has the obligation to manage your money responsibly and return it to you when you ask. PayPal has not signed any such charter and can suspend your account without warning and without refunding you your money. No proper bank does that.

PayPal is fine when it works, but when it doesn't you're up shit creek without a paddle.

Microsoft Windows patent will spy for advertisers

Just stick to pre-Vista software

And buy a hardware firewall and turn off Windows Automatic Updates.

XP has no adware in applications, and Office 2000 is more than enough for almost everyone.

I will never pay for ad-supported applications, not will I fork over my hard-earned money for any OS or app that I know spies on me and phones to its masters.

It's MY computer ! MINE ! And I'll do what I feel I want to do with it, whether or not that pleases Gates & Co.

Microsoft is now officially way off course with their software department. They are using the slogan "Your potential, our passion". That should be changed to "Your privacy, our revenue".

If I want ads, I'll pick up a mag or look at the tube or take a drive. I DO NOT want ads on my PC, and CERTAINLY NOT when I'm working on it !!

Where do I want to go today ? ANYPLACE WITHOUT ADS, MORONS !

MPs call for British manned space flight

Re: Re: More spending

I'll second that !

El Reg lobs iPhone at Genius Bar

You truly are a w*nker.

Congratulations on your tremendous insight and valued opinion, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Too bad you didn't have the balls to actually put your name on your comment.

Italian police net 26 in phishing takedown

It did not fail

The park rangers did not fail in their uprising - they effectively took each and every national park HQ building over all the national forests - only nobody ever knew about it so the rangers went back home after their rations ran out.

Iraq base plans left on open servers

What about responsability ?

Don't you just love how you can read, year after year, how those who are in charge of security fail dismally at actually being secure, and that none of the errors are followed by any kind of sanction, and hardly any improvement ?

Did anyone get fired after this latest security failure was revealed ? Did any company lose a contract ? Did anyone get a public shaming and a note in his employment record ?

And does anyone thing anything is going to change by making this information public ? We all know that the government and its organizations are years behind in security matters. It appears things are not really getting any better.

Man uses tank in phone mast flattening rampage

Fired 12 rounds

Only because one of the cops present had done his military service in the Armor Brigade and knew how to open the hatch on that specific model of tank. Seems that it is not so easy.

Funny thing, though, that in Australia, land of the so-called crooks and renowned for the aggressive behavior of its males, this guy got peppered and thrown in jail, whereas in the Land of the Used-To-Be Free, the guy got swiss cheesed and thrown into a body bag.

Ironic ?

US seeks mini-Imperial Walker mule-bots

Multiple problems

First of all, the noise issue is a very big one. Who is this "dog" supposed to be for ? Special Forces ? Not if it makes a racket. Regular troops ? They march by the hundreds and make enough racket already, so just put a truck behind them to carry their stuff, it won't make much of a difference.

I can imagine a robot for bomb-disposal or landmine detection (just have it run over the target zone), but I don't think troops would like regular visits from an ammo robot that would reveal their position on a continuous basis. I have no experience myself, but I don't think that real-life combat resembles Counter-Strike or BF2142 in any way. I think real troops in a firefight prefer cover and concealment. A racket-making robot dragging ammo around every quarter hour would tear both to shreds, not to mention being a walking target of destruction itself (hey, isn't that an ammo dog ? Give me the rocket launcher and tell me where it stops !).

As for the stealth aspect of things, if it is supposed to go on a mission with Special Forces troops, then it needs to be as silent as possible and a lot more enduring than 2 hours, or even four. Special Forces missions are not the kind you do in two hours, in my opinion. Trekking over a few kilometers of jungle to infiltrate an enemy position with the goal of destroying a satellite dish or fuel tanks is not going to be facilitated by a robodog that needs feeding every two hours. And they're not going to carry it until they need it - they have enough to carry already.

Frankly put, aside from bomb detection and eventually disposal, I fail to see where a robodog is really going to be better than a more conventional transport vehicle.

Top 10 e-commerce developments of the decade

As Greg said

It's a list made by people in suits - whose company firewall probably blocks YouTube. And online payments are handled by Finance, so they wouldn't know about that either.

Skinkers to provide live TV over the net

Countdown has started

How long will it be before Skinkers is renamed to Stinkers ?

Come on, you know I'm right.

And 768k in upload ? God I'd like to have that speed ! Most people I know have either 64k or 128k in upload, even though they have up to 8Mb in download.

Sounds like a failure in the making to me.

Golf and Intel Inside China threaten life as we know it

Yeah, Léon, you're right

Let's all studiously keep each other's point of view out of our respective sights. Let's avoid any exposure to someone who thinks differently, and let us especially not put our own selves into question.

Ignorance is the best. That way, any time we want to declare a war on the others, all we need to justify it is to show how disgustingly different they are.

Sprint boots 1,000 phone customers for talking too much

I wouldn't mind . .

. . having CZJ take care of _my_ "business".

Euh, like they say : I'll get my coat.

Oh, and Mr. Phreaky, while I agree with you that jerk customers deserve getting the boot, I also happen to have a similar opinion on people who don't bother to read before they comment. If you had actually read the article you flame the author for, you might have noticed that the author specifically states : "each of these account holders has been phoning customer care 'hundreds of times a month' for a '6 to 12 month' period"

Microsoft re-assures partners on Vista compatibility

Is this Turner guy a psychotic ?

PR officials are kind of like diplomats for a dictatorship - they have to spin whatever crazy ideas the madman is having at the moment while just learning about the issue in the papers.

But here we have major cognitive dissonance, and I fear for Turners' sanity. From "it's fine out of the gate", "coverage nearly completed" and "had the best application compatibility when we launched" to "well there might be a problem","4000 drivers are incompatible" and "we're just getting started", there is a very wide range of difference here.

Personally, if one tenth of what I hear the problems are on Vista are true, then Vista is certainly not the product with the best application compatibility that Microsoft has put on the market.

Currently I have XP, and in my eyes, this OS is by far the best OS Microsoft has ever made. I can install almost all the applications I used under 98, and even some I used under 95. In short, XP allows me to do what I want.

Vista is not there, not by a long shot. Microsoft is indeed "just getting started".

SP1 is more necessary than ever, apparently.

But someone should call the medics - Turner is in danger of losing his grip on reality.

Microsoft promises VMware beater despite reversals

"we do migration: quick migration"

Yep, especially between press releases, where you migrate your entire product down a notch or four. If MS's virtualization is anything like Vista, by the time the product hits the shops the only thing it will be able to do is virtualize MS-DOS sessions.

But it will do it in 3D thanks to a nice AERO interface.

MySpace succumbs to The Buttock

Trade unions ?

As opposed to the military-industrial unions running some others countries of note ?

No, French comedy is not the trade unions, it's the politicians !

Samsung to launch '€400' Blu-ray/HD DVD player next month

So now a customer has to pay €400 to get shafted ?

Well that certainly is an improvement of sorts. But with all the DRM and mistrust that permeates Sony products nowadays, I'll stick to DVD and something I can control.

When the player/recorder is down to €70, when the list of available titles goes over the 10,000 mark and when I can easily find a crack for the DRM infection, I might consider paying for the privilege of being another customer Sony is just waiting to sell more boot-sector malware to.

Nah, on second thought Sony can just can it. I'm through with Sony products.

Pascal.

Sick to death of the bloody iPhone? Click here

It's not the flaming norm' for a commercial item

It is in Turtleneck Land. Saint Jobs has been selling them fashion accessories without battery hatches since as far as they can remember (not vary far, I grant you that), so therefor it is the Law of Their Land . . until His Jobsiness decides otherwise.

And keep quite . . if you wake them up they only cry louder.

Three critical flaws mark July Patch Tuesday

Oh my goodness ! It's the Gnome Patrol !

So gnomes are trademarked now ? Will the madness never end ?

Sun's activity not to blame for climate change

If it were bogus science

Well maybe CERN has to look into it to judge whether or not it is, in fact, bogus ?

There is one thing that is sure : the perpetual motion machine is bogus science. That is fact and no scientist worth his diploma will say the contrary, nor will you see CERN fund a project on that.

For all the rest, well if it holds up in theory then someone has to check it, right ?

As for what is causing global warming warming, I submit that we have very scarce data to go on (less than 200 years total, and probably most of it is very much less reliable than what we've had in the past 30 years). There is, as of yet, no accurate model of weather on a planetary scale, although the meteorologists, aided by ever-more-powerful computers and increasing data points, are doing their damndest to get there.

We are, as of now, capable of predicting tomorrow's weather within an acceptable accuracy in terms of living conditions, but certainly not in terms of scientific certainty. We can have an insight into what the weather will be in a week's time, but more often than not we are dead wrong.

In short, it amazes me that, given the admittedly overwhelming difficulty of comprehending and modeling thermodynamics, people can use barely a century of reliable weather data to state that the cause of climate change is one thing or the other, or even that our climate is changing and not just going through a variation of some sort.

Personally, I do believe that something is going on. I used to see snow on the ground in winter that lasted weeks at a time - it's been fifteen to twenty years since a snowstorm left the ground white for more than a few days. My mother used to tell me stories of how she sometimes went to school in her childhood in a sled, drawn by her father - fat chance my daughter would get to do that, even excepting that her school is a bit too far for that kind of trek anyway. And I do believe that we are currently living the very worst "summer" I have ever experienced in a string of summers of decreasing quality.

So something is certainly happening, but I think we're going to need at least a few more centuries of data before we know whether it's getting hotter or colder.

In the meantime, maybe we should kill 2 or 3 billion people and find out if that brings us back to 1700s weather patterns.

Not that we will, of course (we won't, right ?), but hey, billions more people raising billions more livestock should count for nothing ?

Nah, that can't be. There has got to be an impact. Pass me the salt so I can think it over while munching on this juicy steak.

A serious browser vulnerability, but whose?

that's kinda childish

It's all kinda childish, like 99% of forum discussions on the Net. Why ? Because it's mostly children (meaning fanboys) that participate.

I'm surprised that the rhetoric here has remained quite calm and rather level-headed. Must be the moderators putting down 90% of the comments.

Ballmer charts future of online togetherness

Long live the troglodytes !

Hmm, I don't think people will flock to put their personal data to unsecure, unreliable online storage brokers, so I'm a troglodyte ? In that case, viva troglodyta ! Or something.

I think that, at the moment, 90% of all meeting minutes, reports and summaries gets printed. It may be that it has something to do with readability - some people have an innate distaste of reading things on a screen. I'm okay with that, even though I think it is a waste of tree matter. But I believe there is something more : paper is 100% reliable. It does not change version, it doesn't store malware, it does not bluescreen on you nor does it reboot, and it doesn't have connection problems. Plus it is actually quite difficult to change its contents unnoticed without changing the paper, so it is quite secure as well.

If, in 50 years starting now, ISPs and online storage brokers demonstrate the same uptime availability as my telephone company does for my phone, well I'll start thinking about it.

In the mean time, the PC is just about the most unreliable piece of kit I have ever owned, and certainly the most unsecure when I'm connected to the Internet. Put personal or business files on an online shop ? Are you freaking nuts !?

TiVo and Amazon get with the picture

All purchases are stored online by Amazon

The better to track what you buy and how often you watch it.

Women prefer well-built blokes: official

Other sub-cultures

"Other people in other sub-cultures have other considerations."

Yeah, like sex.

And booze.

Texas porn actress stole classmate's name

"There is no bad blood between them."

I believe that sentence needs the past tense.

Also, I note with interest that, if I were to choose a scene name with the rules above, it would be Kye Berry.

Hmm. Not bad, actually.