Posts by Pascal Monett

"contribute fairly to network costs"

I still don't understand that argument.

To connect to the Internet, I pay my provider a monthly due. That is supposed to cover my bandwidth usage.

El Reg has a connection, and it pays its provider as well (probably more than I do). That covers its bandwidth usage.

Where is the unfair part of all of this ?

If it's because there's a carrier between me and El Reg, well it's up to my provider and El Reg's provider to manage the situation. El Reg is not supposed to pay every provider along the way.

This is nonsense.

I bailed after 2142

My group of friends and I had a blast with Battlefield 2. It's simple : I played that game so much that the DVD broke and I had to buy another one.

Of course, we played on my local server, hacked by a now-defunct team of dedicated Internet gaming experts which allowed me to run a 128-slot server populated by the largest maps and tons of bots for whatever slots were not taken up by players. We also had custom airplanes, and I particularly liked the Warthog.

We had tons of fun, and our own ranking board.

The only issue was that, of course, EA Games did not like that people had servers that they did not pay EA Games for, so every update broke the ranking and, sometimes, even broke the server. When that happened we had to find workarounds, like putting specific addresses in the hosts file to ensure that the server stayed local. It was an increasingly frustrating headache, but that did not make us stop.

What made me stop was BF 2142. It was not uninteresting, but you couldn't play solo and you couldn't have a personal server. EA Games had obviously learned the lessons of BF2 and was determined not to let players have fun on their own.

The issue I had with 2142 was that every single patch basically required that I reinstall 2142 from scratch. I did not have a fiber connection at the time, I was on a 10Mbps ADSL line. It took basically all day to update. It was a terrible update system and I hated every moment of it. The final straw came when the online install package asked me for my DVD key. DVD key ?!? What the blazes does an online store ask me for a DVD key ?

So I fired off a rather angry mail to support telling them what I thought of this insane situation. The response : my profile got banned.

You banned me because your shit-for-brains system didn't work and I had the gall to complain ? Fine, EA Games, we're done. You stole my money and you don't know how to make fun games anymore anyway.

EA Games is now banned from my life. I don't regret it.

"It hinges on your ability to be efficient with power and thermal space in these tiny form factors"

It hinges on a lot more than that.

Google Glass was an interesting project in itself, but much more in what it revealed about the people using it and how the rest reacted to it than it was actually of any use.

VR has been trying to break into the real world for years now, and none of the issues have really been solved. I'm talking about the weight of the headgear, its comfort and how long it can work, not to mention the sharpness of the image. That last point has a direct impact on how long the headgear can function. Want it to function longer ? Add more battery weight. It's a vicious cycle.

So, we're now pretending that we can have AR goggles that work all day long ? Most laptops can't do that, and they have bigger batteries.

Ah, Lego

I still have two crates full of those little barefoot menaces.

These days I let the nephews and nieces have their fun. I'm guessing in a decade, it'll be the grandchildren.

Personally ? I spent years playing with my Legos. Fond memories.

Now I have a computer. And for my computer, I have Minecraft.

Infinite bricks for the win.

"the injunction would impose irreparable injury"

Irreparable, yes, but not important.

Apple will survive even if Epic wins, and it's not like Apple will have to pay what Epic is not giving now.

Yes, Apple will make less money, but it already has litterally more money than it can spend. It is the top company in the world by market cap and is more valuable than Facebook, Nvidia and TSMC put together. It can take the hit.

Personally, I would not respond to this appeal.

I sympathise with the opinion

Choice is crucial, for sure, the The Cloud is never going to be a level playing field.

It was created by behemoths, and the little flies that flit around them will only be tolerated as long as they don't become a bother.

OneNote's integration into Windows, as much as it irks me, was obvious. Of course Borkzilla is pushing Teams and Office 365, you can't stop that.

It took over a decade and a legnthy trial to give us the possibility of having another browser than IE as default, and now Borkzilla is trying to tie Edge in again.

It's the nature of the beast.

The criminal world is still a capitalist market

It is fascinating to view how criminals recreate and expand on everything legal markets have concieved of.

It sure would be interesting to see how criminals implement secure transactions - that has to be worthy of analysis.

Their only problem is that, well, they're all criminals. There's no guarantee that nobody is going to attempt to hack their own systems.

What a life.

Taking a local hostage

Well yes. It's not cynical, it's perfectly normal. In a world where Zuckerberg is free to ignore repeated pleas and demands for making his cash cow more palatable to the concept of morality, it is obvious that one way to make that bastard focus on the issue is to drag the local CEO muppet in front of the beak and make him sweat.

Add a bit of inside pressure to the outside pressure that apparently does nothing at all to His Zuckyness.

And you can put the name of any multinational conglomerate that has a high presence on the web and no stores anywhere in the same basket. Right now we are under the influence of American companies, but nothing says that China, India or even Russia could not, one day soon, have an outrageously successful app on the Internet that is used the world over. When that day comes, we won't have more influence over the makers of that product than we have now over Facebook.

That is not acceptable when the risk is (young) people being stalked or abused.

"organisations caught in tit-for-tat nation state-backed attacks being left high and dry"

Understandable, even if it is an easy cop-out for insurers.

It is obvious that insurers, however close to lawyers they may be, do not have the funds to reimburse damages that can be attributed to acts of war.

Otherwise, if you really want that kind of protection, imagine what your insurance bill is going to become . . .

"I prefer not to think about it too much."

Indeed, that is my approach as well concerning anything I can do nothing about.