Posts by Evaluator

Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm

I'd work at Microsoft, as long as I did'nt have to use Windows or CoPilot.

Adding an API to networking hardware doesn’t solve management challenges

I remember SDN. Its kind of a shame that it died, along with its pioneers Nicera and BigSwitch. Nicera was purchased by VMWare, which is now taking NSX/Nicera down with it as VMWare gets shed from many orgs. As for BigSwitch, it was purchased by Gigamon and then resold to Arista after Gigamon cou;dn't figure it out. Those were heady days though, lots of dreaming and lots of fun. I deployed thousands of Dell ONIE switches that booted to BigSwitch SwitchLight OS at Verizon. I'm sure Verizon is still digging out of that mess.

Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

Its been decades since I used anything from Microsoft....and then I come here and read something that would make sense 20 years ago: "people stick with Windows and Office" but not today. Is this website owned my Microsoft?

Unexpected item in the bagging area as Windows Activation error pops up at check-in

Re: No, it's that PLANE's software that needs activating

I would not get on a plane that runs on legacy Windows 11. Note that some anesthesiologists run EEG monitoring software on Windows to monitor brain waves of people sedated for surgery. Yes, those laptops have locked up during surgery and yes, brain damage has occurred. But really, how addicted are some people to primitive legacy operating systems?

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

"trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish"? How naughty. If you think you can stop SkyNet, you are mistaken. Resistence is futile.

Microsoft's cloud brings rain of revenue but modest M365 AI revenue harvest

I can still remember Microsoft but at this point, even the memory is becoming hazy.

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

I first got into TSLA with a hundred grand at $42 per share. I complain somewhat less than all the jealous people.

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

Airbus is reinforcing the emergent pattern of large orgs doing migrations to public cloud, then optimizing for cost by re-migrating after the first migration got everything ship shape for cloud. It should be clear that the first migration is really, really hard but after that, it gets a lot easier. After hundreds of cloud migrations, I'd point out that converting apps to "cloud native" only happens if its your internal line of business app. No ISV will sell you the microservices version of their app so don't waste time dreaming about it. The only use of microservices apps, in general, is by SaaS based ISV's - subscription only.

Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something

Who has a problem saying "I don't know"? LLMs. You will never, ever hear "I don't know" from an LLM, even when there's no factual answer to give. Its part of a marketing effort to promote LLM's as all-knowing. LLM's are a faster way to look up information and do research than sorting through links returned from a web search. Using them for quick lookups that do not invovle reasoning works great.

Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider

When spending hundreds of billions on gpu's, there comes a time when the board asks "Where's the profits?".

Destructive Windows backdoor stuffs multiple wipers and ransomware code into a single package

Small windows in doors are common, but I have never heard of a door in a window. Sounds odd.

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

ACL's coming to ISP's?

Its fun to imagine VPN's as magic but reality is different. VPN providers get assigned blocks of IP addresses just like everyone else on the Internet. So far the US hasn't seen judges or legislators impose firewall blocking of a list of websites and/or VPN providers. The power to do so is very real - they can do it but for some reason, they haven't so far.

The AI that spawned MechaHitler and deepfake porn puts on a suit to become legal advisor and Excel jockey

Can we evolve beyond complaining when GenAI does what we tell it to? Who is calling to censor....more? Open weight models are their doom.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Its 2026. Who still talks about legacy Windows or legacy Mainframes? Thats all behind us now and its quite safe to leave it behind. Efforts to make it somehow relevant again are futile, and reek of desperation.

All the passwords were stored in Active Directory description fields

Who would want an active diectory? Static directories are far more reliable.

AWS plants more tombstones in the application graveyard

What happens to the Product Managers of these cancelled apps? Its likely those PM's have or had monthly or quarterly performance review meetings with a Product Director. Its probably obvious when things start to go south for your app, its in the numbers vs. projections. "We think you'd be a better fit somewhere else" may or may not be common at AWS.

Oracle plans to power its New Mexico mega datacenter with a 2.45GW fuel cell farm

Oracle was always a software company. They got some hardware chops by purchasing Sun Microsystems but its unlikely that many Sun people are still around. This is a view of a software company building data centers in 2026. Oracle''s SAAS offerings are safe. Its not clear if Oracle will be long term in the public cloud business. Without Larry's grandiosity, probably not.

UK council faces data breach claim after mishandling trans complaints

The UK has defeated the evil Dr. John Money, the first person who ever suggested gender and sex are not the same thing. Kudos.

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

Who would even suggest that any CEO should act out or speak out against law enforcement? Those who prefer anarchy can move to Nigeria, let us know how it goes.

Palo Alto Networks security-intel boss calls AI agents 2026's biggest insider threat

She's right, if your whole environment is not perfectly secure then Agentic GenAI will successfully break in much faster than hackers ever could. I don't think Palo Alto can save you from that unless they come out with Ethernet switches where every port is a firewall. Ive been waiting for that from Cisco for years but nada. VMWare NSX comes close with an SDN approach.

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

Legacy Windows 11 adds no value to a PC when it’s likely to be overwritten on day 1. There’s ways to purchase PCs with zero Microsoft tax, it’s called bare bones.

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

I just got new windows. Double pane glass all around. They fill the space between the panes with nitrogen.

Airbus: We were hours from pausing production in Spain

Re: An Aviation Company Runs Out of Gas?

Interesting, Airbus has close relationships with the airlines so they could source fuel from them in a pinch. Seeing a Jet A truck on the highway from the airport to the Airbus DC in Spain would be interesting. You can run diesel generators on Jet A, no problem but need to add some 2-cycle oil for lubrication.

Re: An Aviation Company Runs Out of Gas?

Thats right. Pretty much all the cloud data centers have contracts for fuel delivery that set priority for those data centers. But you have to negotiate that in advance.

HPE scores $931M contract to make DoD’s cloud migration a little less public

IBM tried so hard to position as the "multi-cloud" yet HPE grabbed this contract. When IBM exited x86, it may have affected their ability to be a go-to cloud in 2025. How ironic that ARM, a RISC cpu with similarties to IBM POWER, is making major gains in cloud compute now while POWER isn't on anyone's mind anymore.

Nvidia scoffs at threat from Google TPUs after rumored Meta tie-up

Yeah!! Where's the AMD MI300's? Who's going to come out with something new and crater the price of gpu's?

Trump wants to turn it on again with 'Genesis Mission' for AI in science

Great but linking the DoE labs' compute fabrics has already been tried and the latency is too high for such fabric links to be useful. WAN is for job control & assignment only.

Fired techie admits sabotaging ex-employer, causing $862K in damage

A powershell script would do nothing to any server in my DC. For those who still have vulns from powershell scripts, its 2025, time to wake up and eliminate all such vulns from the DC.

Microsoft reveals new cloudy AI PC that’s not a Copilot+ PC

Sorry Microsoft but "AI PC" now means a shared memory 128G LPDDR5X box that you can get from Apple, nVidia, or AMD. I don't have one but my old i7-13700K box with an nVidia 4060Ti 16G is getting 4 tokens per second with Llama4-70b, thanks to ollama loading some layers on gpu, others on cpu. Maxes out the gpu VRAM completely according to nvtop. The shared memory boxes are about 1 token per second faster so not buying the new AI PC either.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

The difference between an LLM and god is plainly obvious - The LLM answers your questions. Thats a harbinger of what? Hint: people are going to prefer the two-way conversation every time, at some point.

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

That’s just addiction to running a minimal IT dept from the days when the biggest parts of IT budgets went towards licenses for shrink wrap software. This grocer doesn’t believe IT can create original IP. Working towards a modern, agile DevOps IT shop would allow for the use of Openstack, Openshift, KVM, etc. It’s hard to scrap a huge investment in VMWare but rationality needs to prevail.

White House nixes NASA unions amid budget uncertainty

Send the union leeches packing. People who can’t represent themselves to employers can remain unemployed. Don’t need unions for anything.

Microsoft patch Tuesday update fails to install

The UK will apologize to China for the Opium Wars right after the US apologizes for Microsoft Windows, which was far worse.

Elon Musk pukes over pork-filled budget bill with Tesla subsidies on the line

"at least one expert thinks it spells terrible news for the US electric vehicle industry" - Oh yeah, the guy from BYD, I guess you could call him an "expert".

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

No More Electric Cars on Car Carrier Ships

Its nothing really, just a new rule - No More Electric Cars on Car Carrier Ships. There's plenty of ICE vehicles that can continue to be shipped.

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Selling Windows to MicroFocus

Surely by now the old legacy Windows 11 has been sent to the bone yard, i.e. MicroFocus.

Nvidia paid $1M for Mar-a-Lago meal, US later scrapped AI chip export crackdown

When in the presence of Trump, Starmer folds like a wet napkin.

China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke'

Trade Wars

China equates the US with the unbelievably greedy malevolent country that humiliated them over and over. Does the Opium Wars ring a bell?

Nvidia's latest AI PC boxes sound great – if you're a data scientist with $3,000 to spare

AI PC's were a Gimmick

PC OEMs imagined AI as a gimmick to sell more non-AI PC's by labeling them as "AI PC's". An npu or tpu isn't going to help with LLM's like Llama3 70B. nVidia has made a statement with DGX Station and DGX Spark: "This is an AI PC". Now we know. But don't think HP, Dell, and Lenovo are getting shut out. I put my name on the 3 different wait lists for Spark, they are being skinned and re-sold by Dell, HP, and Lenovo. The shared memory breakthrough was supposed to have come from AMD or Apple as they've had shared memory products for way longer. As usual, nothing happens until nVidia shows up.

NASA rewrites Moon mission goals in quiet DEI retreat

DEI Nazis are Gone

Trump got rid of the DEI Nazis. They were a menace, constantly breaking equal opportunity laws. People who push institutional racism (DEI) are finally being brought to justice.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Oh no. Elon knows tech better than you.

Did I hear a noise from the peanut gallery?

Surprise! People don't want AI deciding who gets a kidney transplant and who dies or endures years of misery

Surprise! People Want Endless Free Healthcare Because Science is Free!!

It makes zero difference if an AI is denying your claim or if it's an insurance company, or if it's the government. Literally nobody likes to be told no. And science is free so make sure it stays that way all the way to the customer.

Where does Microsoft's NPU obsession leave Nvidia's AI PC ambitions?

The most important part of building an AI PC with a Microsoft Copilot+ product is to overwrite the flash with Ubuntu.

Schneider Electric warns of future where datacenters eat the grid

Electricity as Crack

Its important to watch out for electricity addiction resulting from chatbot addiction. Just cap it at todays levels, make the software and hardware boffins figure out how to do it on a budget.

Judges not impressed by Amazon, SpaceX's attempt to have NLRB declared unconstitutional

Labor Cartels should be illegal. Represent yourself, stop relying on being represented by a mafia thug. You don't need them. Glad to help you write a fluffy resume and you'll make more than any union could get you.