* Posts by Enormous Crowe Turd

11 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jan 2024

The self-created risk in Broadcom's big VMware kiss-off

Enormous Crowe Turd

Damn, I liked vmWare - shame it's as good as dead now - 3 years, maybe 5?

It is a bird, a plane or a Chinese spy balloon? None of the above

Enormous Crowe Turd

Re: Don't they have big telescopes?

Why don't the Chinese just use really big telescopes to spy on the US, what with the earth being flat and all, its all sea between the two land masses centered on the South Pole?

Enormous Crowe Turd

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

Sure, satellites take phots every day, but their positions are well understood, so the powers that be on the ground know when to hide their stuff. Thats why the U2 was built (expensive) thats why spy baloons were built (cheap)

LockBit leaks expose nearly 200 affiliates and bespoke data-stealing malware

Enormous Crowe Turd

Re: Warning

Maybe they already have everything they need. Many of the perpetrators of internet scams are outside the jurisdiction of the West - ie: China / N. Korea / Russia - maybe even state sponsored - so a middle finger is all you have...

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

Enormous Crowe Turd

Re: "hundreds of millions of Windows 10 devices are destined for landfills"

Hospitals (for instance) are full of ancient PCs connected to and controlling diagnostic / clinical kit. Not connected to any networks, no reason to upgrade (and plenty of reasons to not upgrade), that just simply chug away doing their job.

Enormous Crowe Turd

Re: What does "stream an app" mean?

Yep, Citrix was a technical solution looking desperately for a problem to solve. Sure there were some use-cases where temporary (and/or) remote access to an on-prem desktop was required, but by and large citrix just doubled the costs of deploying desktops. Frustratingly, the Unix world had already solved this years before with hardware x-terminals that ran an application on a server, but all the window graphics /keyboard/mouse ran locally on the (fairly) smart x-terminal - x-terminals were (largely) dumped by the industry for thin clients (for no good reason) which were by-and-large less performant and more troublesome to manage.

Upstart retrofits an Nvidia GH200 server into a €47,500 workstation

Enormous Crowe Turd

Why?

At the risk of sounding negative, what's the point?

Amazon extends the life of its servers to six years, expects $900m benefit in 90 days

Enormous Crowe Turd

Re: “ the change will contribute $900 million to net income in Q1 of 2024 alone”

In accounting terms, if an asset costs £10K when initially bought new, and is written down over say 5 years, then £2K is written off its value each year, at the 5th year once fully written down, it is worth £0 to the business + whatever value it might have as second user kit. Generally the market for used/old servers is pretty marginal since few organisations want to be bothered with out-of-warranty kit with the cost and risk of transportation to new facility - so that old server is maybe worth £500 on the open market. Many/most big companies destroy kit rather than re-sell it.

But if you sweat the asset and keep it in service a couple of extra years and have an inrastructure that allows for failure without no reduction in service, then that old server is paying for itself at something below £2K per year - great business sense, good for the environment - nobody loses - and Cloud implementations offer this. It's a bit like you or me reaching retirement age, but being required to pay your employer to continue working there, albeit doing to do a slightly less intensive job. Fortunately, computers don't have rights.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Enormous Crowe Turd

Re: Backwards

Cash strapped schools keep forcing iPads, and Laptops onto kids that cost several hundred pounds each, when they could simply be using a pi400 costing £30 each that has all the same capabilities and much less faff factor. But schools do like to blow money on toys to keep the little'uns amused under the pretense of being a valuable teaching aid. My wife's experience of issuing laptops to kids in school was that they were invariably broken -or- if not broken subject to kids breaking them, while iPads were targets for light fingers. None of the kids would consider nicking a pi400 - and ALL of the content they access in school is web-based...

Road to Removal: A blueprint for yanking billions of tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere

Enormous Crowe Turd

Re: forests are great CO2 sinks

Basically, I agree, but Point 3:

3 - Return to using wood as a primary material for building and many other things, and have plantations of suitable trees, in whose structure the carbon would be captured. This is a medium-term solution though as eventually the structures need to be renewed and there's only so much you can build with wood.

There are 200yr old wooden structures still around, but not many 100yr concrete monstrosities - the reason why is simply that wooden structures tend to be on a smaller / more maintainable scale, whereas when a concrete tower block starts degrade - there's really not much that can be done other than to blow it up and have another go. Yes there's Roman buildings, but the majority material was stone there...

Enormous Crowe Turd
Mushroom

Re: wish you were right ...

Yep - that was my understanding, and before 350mya, those lignin plants didn't exist, if we leave it to nature to evolve a solution, we might therefore be looking at 50m yrs, and that is just too long a Return On Investment to interest the policy makers. Of course if sea levels may rise and cover the bio mass, then we don't need to be patient for evolution to sort it out, and we can rely on good old geology to rush a solution through instead.

Jokes aside, I've gone from a Climate Change change disbeliever (Climate Change is just weather) to concerned citizen (Climate Change may be just weather, but it's accelerated a hundred-fold) and it's not that we can deny that climate change is happening or the inevitability of global warming, it's just that we cannot react quickly enough culturally, or developmentally as a species (and neither can most of our co-habitants of planet earth) to this accelerated global warming.

So in the UK, I think we have done everything we can to make an effective difference (though off-shoring the responsibility of CO2 through manufacturing to China and India is obviously cheating) we are where we are. We should restrict our import of manufactured good to countries who can offer the best environmental credentials, and embargo/tax to hell and back the import of those who can't/won't, I don't accept China / India's argument that the West has benefitted from use of coal/oil for manufacturing, and now it's their turn. Humanity has benefitted, China/India etc have developed their manufacturing and heavy industries on the back of the European Industrial Revolution, and have chosen to solve their energy needs in exactly the same way as the Victorians, but on a vastly bigger scale. There is simply no comparison between the Carbon footprint per capita of 1824 to 2024.

Perhaps we could focus on bringing more manufacturing back to the UK to avoid the additional costs of shipping materials and products all over the world (I refuse to believe there is anything other than a financial short-term benefit to globalisation). Perhaps we should focus on nice environmentally-clean nuclear plants for energy (Solar/Wind/Tidal has its place, but its just not reliable in the UK) now that the GreenPeace Enviromenatalists Eco Warriors have decided that perhaps nuclear was ok all along and seem to have stopped campaigning against it - that said I'm about to invest in solar panels and batteries for home to reduce costs and do my bit, and, yes, we are recent victims of flooding (1 metre deep) which will take 6 months to become re-habitable - that's what you get for living on a flood-plain that should be used for agriculture. Oh well, hindsight and all that!

Perhaps we should consider that MMGW (lets just call it Global Warming), though unfortunate, is inevitable and start planning how we are going to deal with it more effectively (there's only so much hand-wringing can be done) and start restricting housing developments from flood plains, support farmers by promoting local produce and seasonal diets. Start moving population centers away from sea-level-vulnerable locations (good bye London). Whatever the plan is, we're at the tipping point and throwing money at it (without the right plan that is coordinated WW) just isnt going to quick-fix it now (sorry Greta) the solution is going to be generational (it took us 10 generations to get here, and it'll take at least 10 generations to fix it) and we need to embrace the sort of long-term thinking that built cathedrals, and planted trees in stately homes (that we will not see the benefits in our lifetime) - if we are to make any real progress here.

Or else come to terms with just how much our children and grand-children will be affected. Time will show that we don't really own anything, we're just the custodians.