Posts by Pascal Monett
2004 posts • joined Tuesday 10th April 2007 17:34 GMT
Page:
Awww, now you destroyed your own joke. I thought you'd done that on purpose !
Why do we need new suitcases ?
Aren't RFID tags dirt-cheap nowadays ?
Don't we already have barcode stickers slapped on our luggage when we register them at the desk ?
Why have they not put 2 and 2 together ?
I acknowledge without any problem that RFID-tagged luggage would certainly be easier to sort in the baggage handling area, but I really don't see why I should change my luggage for that.
As for leaving the traveler to declare the suitcase contents before even registering, I cannot comprehend how that can possibly be accepted in a world where you can't bring a half-liter bottle of effing WATER in your carry-on.
For security reasons, it seems obvious to continue with the current procedure of having travellers register their luggage, having that luggage screened and scanned, and adding the RFID technology to aid in routing the luggage through airport baggage handling.
But hey, what do I know ? I'm just a traveler.
There just might be a silver lining though
Apart from just how badly Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot again, there just might be potential for something good to come out of this.
I'm thinking of a law mandating that any company pushing monthly fees (aka licensing or renting) on games be legally forced to keep the servers running until the very last player has revoked his license, not until the game maker decides that it is not making enough money on it anymore.
I mean hey, if they can stiff us with monthly fees and online registration, we should at least be the ones with the right to decide if or not it is time to retire the game.
And yes, I'd like some fries with that.
Man, I don't even understand these comments !
I'm starting to understand their accounting practices
You pay £1, they write down £37.
Really ? Where do the other £36 come from ?
Such calculations may work in La-La land, but in the real world when you pay £100, the intermediaries get £90 and the producer gets 10£ (if he's lucky). And concerning the GDP argument, pay your taxes, then come back and talk about GDP. As long as you do everything you can to avoid taxes, I don't see why any country should waste money defending your products.
In any case, that certainly explains the RIAA's method for calculating the amount of the "fines" counting in millions for a few uploads.
Well I'm off that boat anyway, I use LibreOffice. Does 100% of what I need, so I see no reason to pay for more.
Exactly what I though when I read the words "providing all the calories and nutrients the human body requires".
You nailed it, sir !
Re: I'm happy they finally LISTENED for once.
Ten thousand testers with bullhorns is hardly what I'd call LISTENING.
The failure of TIFKAM as it is now called is a surprise for no one. Microsoft was warned well in advanced, but bull-headed its way through as it always does.
Money talks, and money is the only thing Microsoft is paying attention to. Now that TIFKAM is indeed gearing up to be the Waterloo that users said it would, MS is suddenly trying to do something else, like actually PAYING ATTENTION to what has been said and repeated in its own forums.
I agree that the Internet is a great tool for knowledge. I had the opportunity to use it in 2010 to get myself a certification in web design and web server maintenance. Did it from home thanks to an online course, saved a lot on travel expenses and could work all day without interruption. There were workshops scheduled at regular intervals, you could chat with the professor in charge and ask your questions. It worked rather well for a group of adults.
Without that course, I would have had to register in a brick-and-mortar place, which might not have had space for me, would be at an hour's drive away, and would require me to bother with noon meals, all that at a time when I was without a job and thus preferred not spending all that money on gas and food.
Now I have a job again, even though I'm not doing much web design I'm mighty happy about how it all turned out.
So yeah, school on the Internet, I'm all for it.
"There's this concern that we are somehow going to misuse this data"
Not at all, my good Mr. You-Have-No-Privacy-Get-Over-It Schmit. Oh, you thought we'd forgotten that ? We never will.
We're not "concerned" that you are "somehow" going to misuse the data. We are CERTAIN you are going to index that data seven ways to Sunday and sic your advertisers on us with it.
Difference.
Re: why the hell can't I try everything before I buy it?
Steam games often have a demo version.
Not always, I agree, but often.
Personally, I use and abuse of their Wishlist functionality. Games are often sold at lower prices a few months after the initial launch. I can wait a bit, helps me find out from first-day buyers if the game is interesting before I put my money on it.
Then there are the titles I don't feel like waiting for and just buy & try as soon as the download is finished. No need to go to a store, where PC games aisles have all but disappeared.
I think Steam is doing a damned good job of keeping the games industry alive, what with their indie section, multi-platform coding and their "comprehensive" approach to DRM.
I've come to the point where, if a game is not on Steam, I practically don't buy it. There are a few exceptions, but they are exceptions.
I can understand your argument, and I give you an upvote for the basic truth you expose. Of course, if you are happy with a touchscreen, more power to you. After all, a touchscreen is still a screen.
The difference - in my mind - is that I don't mind if the touchscreen on my phone is smudged - I don't look at it all that often. And when it does have smudges, my phone is easy to clean and it's quickly done.
Contrast that with the widescreen I have for my PC, which I stare at for hours at a time, and is placed on the other side of my desk (ie hard to get to because desk against the wall so no going around). Smudges on that screen bring immediate irritation to me because a) they're a constant nuisance while I'm working and b) I'm going to have almost lie on the desk to clean the whole screen for that darn smudge so as not to leave traces on the rest of it.
There are people who are not bothered by screen smudges. Good for them. I'm not one of those. I like my screens spotless. And touchscreens simply cannot be spotless. Ergo, I'd go mad working with one if I couldn't avoid touching it.
Re: Talking is information
Um, well technically I agree, but from what I hear on the bus around me, I just cannot bring myself to subscribe to your opinion.
"[a] device that connects to a website"
Great idea, Paypal. That way, the miscreants will have just one site to hack to steal personal data on everyone and gain access to absolutely all banking data there is. If ever that site came to exist, it would require ironclad security of the likes we have not yet seen and would probably not be able to implement properly. Hopefully they would at least salt their hashes ?
Uh, Paypal, between your arbitrary account locking based on "suspicions" that you never justify, your inexistant customer support and now this idea, I'm starting to wonder whose side you're on - ours, or the criminals ?
Re: "it does take up screen space"
Funny how all those people using that argument against the Ribbon have never found out that you can minimize it to show only tab names and still work with it - since when you mouse over a tab name the Ribbon shows that tabs' content.
I am not a Ribbon fanatic, but I do have to use 2010 like practically all business users (I'd rather stick with Office 2000 - it has more than I need already). It rather galls me that people stay fixated on this non-issue of Ribbon size instead of bashing stuff that really needs bashing.
So the bottom line of this article is
. . . that all these IPCC "experts" don't know how to write a document.
Really ? And these people are supposed to be experts ? I thought experts in their field were recognized because of the mass of papers that they had published. So writing a report shouldn't be that much of an issue for them, should it ? And if we're talking about some internal policy or another, how long can it take these supposedly intelligent people to learn ? How about an afternoon of training, instead of wasting judges' time and taxpayer money ?
Oh, sorry, I forgot : actually doing something useful is not the goal here.
Re: "the [..] CRS will come to your town every year"
You make it sound like an annual fair or something.
And you forget to mention that the Gendarmerie (whose members are counted among the nations armed forces - just like the army) has offices all over national territory as well.
C'est bon, on avoue : nous sommes bien une dictature !
"new features are rolled out at the flip a switch [...]"
Ah, the magic of the Cloud (tm).
As if there wasn't an army of coders hammering away at the code in order for some admin drone to be able to "flip the switch".
And we've seen some pretty ugly results already when the "magic" of the Cloud meets the grim reality of load balancing and other server-side issues (hey Microsoft, any word on Azure clients' web site restore ?).
Let's keep our feet on the ground, shall we ? It may be "someone else's data center", but that in no way changes anything about the number of coders involved nor does it diminish in any way the dangers of rolling out an update or a new functionality.
The BIG difference is that, when it goes down (and it does), you will have no control over when it comes back up nor what state it will be in (eh, Azure users ?).
THAT is the reality of the Cloud.
A touchscreen for a PC ?
What for ?
Do they really think I want to do my coding by poking at my screen ?
On a PC I have a mouse and a keyboard that fulfill 100% of my computing needs. Requiring that I actually touch the screen is not only superfluous but also a waste of time, not to mention a possible health risk, what with the possible hazards to the back. Keeping a proper ergonomic stance all day long is difficult enough without having to bend over the keyboard to poke at some vertical surface.
A touchscreen is only useful when you don't have a keyboard. It becomes necessary if you have neither keyboard nor mouse. If you have both, it is nothing more than a waste of money.
Thanks for the heads-up
It's good to know beforehand just what Facebook is going to bork this time.
Granted, on the hacking you're right, it's beggars belief.
But hell does the explosion scene at the beginning make up for it !
Re: Err, hang on a minute ...
Yeah, hang on. All those Wikipedia references and you still missed how Ian Fleming was part of Churchill's "Ungentlemanly Warfare Group" ?
And you fail to reference this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming ?
Not to mention this : http://www.cracked.com/article/152_5-authors-more-badass-than-badass-character-they-created/ ?
Really, one might think that you have some sort of bias.
And the answer is, apparently, everything.
QinetiQ : a study in failure.
If only it were the only one.
Very few vendors of such equipment will give this type of assurance
And those who do ensure that their equipment has been hardened against attack are certainly not in the group of vendors who will be considered for procurement, due to the fact that their products are more expensive than those of vendors who do not insure against attacks.
In other words, yeah, smartmeters are dumb, open and unprotected. What a surprise. Security is always a cost, and these "smart" meters were not conceived with security in mind, but with remotely controlling the availability of power on a site (house, appartment, restaurant, industry, . . .).
You get what you pay for.
RF jamming ?
Since when is that supposed to be an issue ? Sure, it'll work the first day or two, if the company was stupid enough to use a WiFi router for all its networking needs, but somebody's bound to notice that the jamming starts when a given van is parked not far away and when they do, the cops will be bringing down that attack venue pretty quick.
Internet vulnerabilities are dangerous because they are (almost) anonymous, overwhelming, are hard to block when they start and can come from any point in the world, which (in most cases) immunizes the attacker from judicial oversight. So it's easy, carries almost no risk and requires next to no physical effort.
RF jamming needs physical proximity to the target, which then forces the attacker to contend with real-life covert activity requirements. Not to mention that a van has somewhat more complicated temperature-control issues, and an idling vehicle staying in place for hours at a time is going to garner attention.
I file that the Unlikely Attack Venue folder. Especially since a simple Ethernet cable is all it takes to thwart the attack completely.
Science marches on
It's good to see that scientists are still working to improve our comprehension of the Real World (tm) and thus our models of it.
The dogs bark, the caravan of science passes.
Climate is difficult, based on thermodynamics which is a very difficult subject. Anything that forwards our knowledge in the subject is good to take, regardless of the changes in our conclusions it can bring. We need to finally understand how our climate works sooner rather than later, in order to shut up the zealots (on both sides) and get on with doing what is really necessary.
"an experiment in education of pirates"
And he's whinging because it failed ?
Well duh.
Here's a counterpoint : it's called Minecraft. That game is all over the place. The graphics are horrible, blocky abominations. The principle is, as far as I can tell, just digging and building stuff. The maker of the game has declared to never, ever include any sort of DRM or protection in it. Minecraft can be bought for 20 bucks, or torrented six ways to Sunday.
The guy (oh, yeah, forgot to add : the ONE guy) who made Minecraft is a millionaire. Hundreds of thousands of people have shelled out for his game. He's so rich he sold his game to a company because he (probably) got tired of the concept of working.
So how does that situate your product ? Firmly in the pile of shit, I'd say. A good game sells, with or without protection.
So go take your righteousness and sit on it. Prick.
Remember the good ol' days when 14" laptops weighed in at 15kg ? And it took eons to get them started, not to mention they crawled along like asthmatic slugs ?
You remember those days, don't you ? And if you do, you do realize that you're complaining about 17" laptops that weigh only 3kg ?
Pff. Never happy, are we ?
Please continue.
Your posts are among the most informative and interesting of this site. If you stop, it will be much harder to actually learn something here.
Beautiful example of PR-speak here
"[This year] remains a transition year" - yeah, you're transitioning into loss.
"This reflects the challenging environment on the web " - yeah, people are still not dumb enough to pay you real money for your cloning efforts ; what a shame.
"We’re excited about the entire category of the social casino" - man, there are SO many people yet to con ! And so many ways to con them !
"regulatory obstacles that we can't predict or control" - whassatyousay ? gambling is illegal in most states ? Chucks ! Now what do we do ?
The climate certainly did not "balance itself back"
Earth's atmosphere today has nothing to do with its content a few hundred million years ago.
The reason that changed was not any Gaia-induced "balance" mode, it was the evolution of algae, then plant life that reconfigured the levels of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen (in my simplified, unscientific understanding of the matter).
If there was supposed to be a "balance", then we'd be gasping in an atmosphere with only 10% of today's oxygen.
Not the point
The point is that there is new data to put into the models, and in order to do so that data must be evaluated and calibrated.
More data is always a good thing to have in climate models.
Not at all.
Try, by all means.
Just don't get religious about what you believe your results show.
At least not until we can accurately forecast whether or not you need a raincoat next month.
Looks like the warmers are on the warpath.
Beware non-believers ! You will be downvoted to the lowest pits of Hell !
Re: "I will be able to find a way to install it on whatever hardware is on the market"
I sincerely hope you do, but I don't think you will.
My original, holographed XP Windows cannot install on today's hardware, it refuses to complete the install process and blue screens every time I try.
If I do want to install on modern hardware, I need an XP SP2 image. That will probably last a few more years, at which point only an XP SP3 image will be able to install on hardware after, say, 2020, for a few more years.
So I'm guessing that, after 2025, you will be forced to install something else whether you like it or not.
Of course, you should probably be able to get XP running in a VM far longer than that - but users don't have to stay in a VM, now do they ?
"business critical applications at risk today, from those that have operated under the radar of IT"
That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, whatever OS is used.
Running a business-critical app without proper backups and support . . . no, I can't believe it can be done by any sane organization.
Sorry, does not compute here.
It's not only that the Internet let's anyone insult anyone else, it's much more the fact that the Internet is millions upon millions of anyone insulting anyone else.
It's purely a problem of scale.
Libel laws were effective up to the first http connection because before that, the only guy to slander you was a neighbor or someone in your rather immediate surroundings. And you would drag him to court over it because the slandering happened in your surroundings.
Now, your immediate surroundings has been artificially expanded to include countless faceless people you don't know, don't know you and will never meet you, but have no fear of commenting on what they read on Twitter or wherever. And since they have the understanding of a goldfish, their reactions are knee-jerk level at best. Unfortunately, their attention span is longer than that of the goldfish, and some can be quite boneheaded about it.
On top of that, it's a lot easier to be relentless when all it takes is sitting behind a keyboard. The Internet has birthed a whole new generation of stalkers of all kinds, and that is a sad fact.
In all this, the law is now swamped and totally overrun by this potential. Libel laws were designed when one person could be found guilty of slandering another. Today, millions can potentially be found guilty of slandering the same person. How to manage that without locking courts up with slander cases until the end of time, excluding more important things like criminal assault, homicide and kidnapping ?
And you can't really say that people are just going to have to thicken their skin - sadly there have been suicides due to this online behavior. Even though that would be the best solution.
I have no idea what the solution is, but it seems to me that the law is not going to help here. This is a social issue that will just have to find a social solution, not a legal one. And, as much as I don't really like the idea, it seems to me that online anonymity is going to be the casualty of this situation.
After all, the evil slanderers and stalkers do their deeds mostly because they think they cannot be traced - until the cops show up at their door with a warrant. So maybe if they knew beforehand that everything they do and say on the Internet can be immediately pinned to their name and address, maybe then they would think twice before gratuitously insulting and harassing someone.
"we would only ever act in response to legislation"
Sounds a bit two-faced to me. They're being consulted on the content of a bill proposal and they want to keep it secret so nobody knows what advantages they get out of it. So, when the bill passes, they really won't have anything to complain about, since they'll have already negociated their advantages.
But I do agree with one thing : it is indeed up to the people to demand public negociations and discussions on any matter pertaining to individual privacy and freedom.
So, when do YOU start the posters and the street signs ?
So, if I understand correctly
"one of the most serious cases of violation of data protection regulations" is only worth a piddling €150K fine ?
No wonder multinational companies do what they like. It's not like they have much to be scared of. The only real goof is the court of public opinion, and Google has manipulated that like a charm (yes it did, it's only us geeks who are all up in arms about this - Joe Public has already forgotten even hearing about it).
Re: Where did we lose it?
We lost it when we saw RIAA suing grandmothers and underage children for ridiculous charges and didn't take the torches and pitchforks to their headquarters to hang the fucker in charge as a warning to other CEOs.
From that point on, companies have opened their eyes to the fact that they can implement any privacy-invasive measure they please and, as long as Joe Public can still post pics on his Wall, he's good.
I blame the increasing selfishness of society, coupled with the apathy of those who only want (for example) their next football fix and couldn't care less what it might cost others to get it.
Re: ahem
Sorry ? Are you suggesting that the next washing machine I buy I have to pay for a 3/4G phone line as well ?
That's going to float as well as a brick in the current market for sure.
No! No! No!
THIS : "all with fondle-happy touchscreen navigation"
Violates the Prime Directive of Driving : Eyes On The Road, Hands On The Wheel.
As such, the ONLY control features that are acceptable are ones we don't need to look at to use (i.e. steering wheel buttons).
Anything else, especially touchscreen (which MANDATES that you look at which point of the screen you are touching) is nothing but a danger to safe driving and should be banned outright, or at the very least only allowed when the vehicle is stationary.
Re: the registry as a single point of failure
We all know that the only reason it is actually there at all is for DRM and RIAA/MPAA-placating purposes.
There is no other excuse for this abomination against Logic, and the Registry doesn't hold a candle to a simple text file in terms of stability and backup/restore ease and confidence.
So, Mother Nature is actually a guy then ?
Let me get this straight
A 0.1% improvement yielding 100,000 times better performance is worth a paper ?
Honey ? You know my drinking habit ? Well I just reduced my consumption by 0.1% !
<thwack!> Ow ! Why aren't you happy ? <bash!> Ouch ! But this is scientific progress ! <boink!> Ahh! (etc...)
It's Apple's money
Frankly I don't see why people are getting all worked up over it - it's not their money after all.
A private company is welcome to build the stupidest things it wants to, and with well over $100 billion to play with, Apple can spare $5 billion on nonsense like this.
Yes, I do think it's useless to build a round building. I suspect either a lot of space will be wasted, or a lot of money will be (to buy expensive rounded furniture). No, I am not particularly impressed with the "eco-friendly" claim that is being made. It's a massive building, there will be massive amounts of trucks and Caterpillars and such gas-guzzlers buzzing around there for years, and only time will tell if the build quality is worth it and the temperature-control methods envisioned are really all that efficient. In any case, it is the project of a private company, with private money, that is not going to cause oil spills or massive ecological damage. It's a building, and it's Apple's building. If Apple's shareholders want it, they get it, end of.
It is no use criticizing billionaire projects - those people don't live in the same world we do. We can, however, point and laugh at shareholders who prefer squandering money instead of getting dividends. Those shareholders being billionairs, it won't be much use either (except to make ourselves feel good).
Re: Round buildings don't work
That's why it's over-budget : they suddenly realized they needed curved furniture !
Re: "Only people who "Can Do" get to make the rules"
Great idea.
I'm sure the Mafia (Russian or other) and the Yakuza (not to mention the Triads) will wholeheartedly agree.
<sarcasm>Actually, one must wonder if placing authority in the hands of criminals would not be more beneficial than leaving it in the hands of professional liars, sorry, politicians.</sarcasm>
<cynism>One thing is sure, if your mayor is a hardened criminal, there will be much greater respect for his "laws" since everyone knows that the penalty for transgressing them is a lump of lead between the eyes.</cynism>
Re: "They have millions of servers and thousands of staff constantly"...
retweaking your privacy settings.
Oops, wrong thread.
Yet, with all those support people, Facebook is still not online 100% of the time, there have been failures.
Makes you step back and ponder that famous "cloud" wonderworld where everyone and his dog is offering to harbor your data.
Seems like it actually takes competence to maintain a cloud operation. Does every cloud provider have that competence ?
Speaking as a Notes consultant and developer . . .
I hate IBM. Mostly I hate how IBM has buried Notes and forgot to ever mention it since it bought Lotus.
Oh sure, IBM made Domino R5 become a real server, robust and all, with real admin tools. Sure, IBM has made Notes/Domino evolve tremendously since the last R4 "Lotus" release, to the point that the R8.5.3 version I am working with actually has next to nothing to do with the good ol' R4.6 client I started doing LotusScript with.
But where are the commercials for this great (from a dev point of view) product ? Where were the seminars to bring in management and make them understand the power of this product ?
What little was done is now gone, companies are moving en masse to Outlook/Sharepoint because IBM wanted to push Websphere, of which they sold 20 copies (give or take a few). So not only IBM has lost a vast installed user base on a great product, but IBM has practically actively pushed them into the arms of MS who is only now offering a similar product with inferior capabilities.
Where I'm working now I hear the Sharepoint team (5 guys) quoting a dev time of no less than three months to do a library booking app. I took a look at the specs and I could do that by myself in Notes in about a week, tops, including user meetings with the inevitable "can we have this button here instead ?".
So I'm honing my Sharepoint skills now, and considering the definition of the term "job security".
No thanks to you, IBM.
"the sort of enormous corporation that upgrades software as infrequently as possible"
Notes/Domino upgrades are free for licensed users.
Historically speaking, it is a proven thing that upgrading is beneficial to performance and has minimal impact on application functionality.
In short, there is very little reason not to upgrade, and cost has next to nothing to do with it.
Of course, in a complex network environment, there may be more things to control in the prep stage, but in "enormous corporations", I don't think that is an issue in itself.
Speaking for me, I know of no company in my economic area that is using less than R7. All companies I deal with are on R8.5.2 at least, which means practically the latest build pre-R9.
But hey, Notes-bashing is a sport, ain't it ?
