* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

Singapore, Amazon lead push for 'purpose bound' digital money

P. Lee

Re: Translation?

To;dr: it isn’t your money. Someone else controls it after you receive it.

No you plebs, you can’t buy a car. “Your” money can’t do that. Live in the pod and eat bugs. Only worthy people can have cars.

Have you used up your heating allowance? It will be a cold winter for you!

NOAA, Microsoft partner to put climate models in the clouds

P. Lee

Re: Can someone explain to a humble techie

It is a terrible idea to not own your core business assets. How independent of Microsoft will the government be if they are dependent on Microsoft's goodwill on a minute-to-minute basis?

Exchange Online and Microsoft Teams went down in APAC because Microsoft broke itself

P. Lee

Re: Which "State level hacking team"

Russians.

Facebook approved 75% of ads threatening US election workers

P. Lee

Five seconds looking at the GlobalWitness.org website reveals them to be far left political activists.

I don't even need to look at the the NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy organisation to know they will be the same.

Both organisations calling for censorship.

Youtube has a banner on the 2022 World Government Summit videos to tell you that the idea of a world government is a conspiracy theory.

Biden went on TV and said that if you got vaccinated you wouldn't get sick and you wouldn't die. That is a lie. Is anyone going to ban him and his organisation?

Didn't think so. So who get's to decide "the truth"?

Yes, we have a cure for misinformation. Its just worse than the problem.

‘Mother of Internet’ Radia Perlman argues for centralized infrastructure

P. Lee

A symposium on decentralised ledgers resistant to government interference, held in Singapore.

So... it wasn't held in Beijing or Ottawa, but I think we all knew where this was going.

I think bitcoin's use is pretty limited too, but sometimes the difficult and inefficient things are worthwhile.

Artist formerly known as Kanye reveals Parler trick: Buying the far-right haven

P. Lee

Re: Perceived ant-semitic posts?

Two questions:

1. Why did he make that comment?

2. What was the result?

If I understand it correctly, he was annoyed because he thinks Jews have far too much control over his life.

And the result?

Legacy media runs headlines saying he's mentally ill, social media bans him and his bank cuts him off.

Do you think this has mitigated or entrenched Kanye's belief, both in his own mind and in the minds of other people looking on?

Regardless of how correct Kanye is, this is how you build credibility for his position.

It seems the banks, legacy, and social media have become so used to wielding ultimate power for banning and censorship that they are unable to effectively respond to those who disagree with them. The tighter they squeeze, the more slips through their fingers.

Kanye is wrong of course. Any social media application which relies on a phone app store can be cancelled. If you don't want to be cancelled, get on Gab.

Gab has been through the cancellation mill for aligning itself with the US Constitution's view on free speech to the point of looking at creating its own bank. I find it amazing how much of America's establishment hate the US' founding values to the point of trying to destroy it, rather than pressing the "mute" button for people they don't want to listen to.

If you didn't want to hear Kanye's thoughts, you could simply not follow him. Instead, his social media platform decided it would make that decision on your behalf.

"Left-wing" or "Right-wing" are less relevant than the difference between those who think you should make your own decisions, vs those who want government and corporations (apparently often at the behest of government) to make those decisions for you. This appears to actually be at the core of what is described by El Reg and the rest of the legacy media as "far right." Will I decide to defend myself from criminals, or will I wait for the police and be defenseless in the meantime? Will I decide to listen to whomever I want, or will some corporation decide that. Will I let the government educate my child, or will I do it? Should I be able to say what I believe to be true, or will I accept censorship by a corporation or the government?

We need to allow people to be wrong, because everyone is wrong before being proved right. Being wrong is our way to improve. Only allowing what is right means everything is already known and there is no more progress to be made. Those currently at the top of the tree would love this to be the case.

People calling free speech a far-right value, makes them look good and making themselves look stupid. Stop being stupid.

SUSE wheels out first public prototype of its server Linux distro, asks for feedback

P. Lee

Re: Pardon?

"Feoll" ... from Proto-West Germanic *fallan. Cognate with Old Frisian falla, Old Saxon fallan, Old Dutch fallan, Old High German fallan, Old Norse falla. (wikipedia)

Foreigners!

China may prove Arm wrong about RISC-V's role in the datacenter

P. Lee

Re: Poor article

It depends what "competitive" means.

Maybe they don't need an epyc server. Maybe they just need a good-enough netbook or phone cpu. While it might be nice to have an iphone 14, the major productivity gains from having a mobile phone are not dependent on Apple's latest CPUs. If you want to have a computer so that your business staff can do their jobs, a desktop i3 may well be plenty to get everything done - a gen12 i7 is not normally needed. Economic progress rarely needs top end tech.

I'm sure India hasn't missed what the West has done to China and Russia. I'm sure they'd also be up for some tech independence.

Dump these small-biz routers, says Cisco, because we won't patch their flawed VPN

P. Lee

Re: They may be "cheap" (not so expensive), but...

You can solve the problem by splitting hardware and software. Open source firewalls/routers and commodity hardware.

It seems there are things companies can’t do.

ICANN responds to Ukraine demand to delete all Russian domains

P. Lee

Re: firewall

I think Desmond was quoting from much earlier, 1700's at least.

The problem here is that its also true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The fundamental problems are:

1. Can we fix the world's problems- is it logistically possible?

2. Even if we had the resources and we wanted to fix all the problems, what's the likelihood of making a mistake and doing evil?

It seems to be that the West pushing for Ukrainian membership of the EU and NATO was like giving a drunk party girl with a long walk home, more alcohol, because she asked for it.

P. Lee

Re: They won't and can't get everything they ask for.

Or indeed, with no thought for the future.

El Reg's note linking the response "that won't satisfy" to the existential threat being endured by those involved, is sentimental claptrap. Ask those being shelled what would really satisfy them, I don't think, "blocking Russia's use of Twitter and Ebay and blocking America's access to RT" would be high on their list.

Will the stupid virtue-signalling never end?

We haven't even mentioned what happens to DNS when everyone sees that anyone America doesn't like get's booted off. We have a phrase for it... Balkanisation. Almost ironic.

Google to auto-enroll 150m users, 2m YouTubers with two-factor authentication

P. Lee

Re: And because we know the best way ...

Indeed. Google have done something absolutely right - 2FA is great and everyone should use it.

And yet, because its Google doing it, its now really creepy. You know people won't be getting dedicated 2FA keys, they will use their phones, most likely with Google's authentication app.

So now Google has your phone linked to their applications on an ongoing basis, even if you're using an iphone.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

P. Lee

Re: Want to run it?

I've been running ubuntu for quite a few months now. Initially I loved its plug-n-play and nice look.

My problem is that snaps and network storage don't seem to play nicely. Its seriously irritating to have parts of your filesystem just not be available.

I get the concept and I like it. Its just too hard to manage.

P. Lee
Linux

Re: Want to run it?

Check out protondb.com to look for how well particular games run on linux.

Valve recently announced some of the anti-cheat software was also coming to linux, which means things like pubg etc will be arriving too.

Former SAP leader's lawsuit claims she was canned for pushing corporate diversity

P. Lee

Re: If only....

Its efficient and its usually the preference of both parents.

P. Lee
Paris Hilton

Re: "Nothing to stop them"

> There is usually something stopping them. Assumptions, biases, etc.

That is, in itself, a massive assumption. Biology skews various attributes, both physical and mental. That's why certain magazines at the supermarket checkout are rarely read by men and many magazines in newsagents are rarely read by women. Men and women have different preferences.

>That's why it's called equal opportunity.

"Equal opportunity" isn't what DIE programs promote. DIE programs promote equal outcomes.

If she was pushing "diversity" she wasn't pushing "excellence" because excellence doesn't care about diversity.

I doubt any of the problems SAP needs to solve are solved by particular genitals, skin colour or sexual preferences, so there is no reason include those attributes in any metrics. Good on SAP for squashing irrelevancy.

SAP is an intellectual property company. High IQ is how they solve problems and high IQ skews towards men at the top end of the spectrum. Engineering seems to attract more men than women lower down the spectrum too. The fact that women do dominate in some industries which used to be male-dominated (such as education) implies that where there is a preference, that shows up in the results, rather than the status quo being some dystopian misogynistic fantasy.

Do we need to point out that women typically take time off to manage a family and therefore tend to drop out of the "top corporate performers" contention? Do I need to explicitly say that children are far more important work than merely getting cash?

Calling out bias rather than preference or competence seems to demand some evidence before being accepted.

As Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

P. Lee
Big Brother

Re: Toy extensions won't mess with their revenue stream.

I like Firefox's persistent cookie container idea - I suspect its more workable than Brave's more aggressive stance, but Brave is my daily driver. I'm always appalled at the internet when I see it in chrome.

I think Google may have miscalculated here. They will make themselves a stink in the nostrils of all techies. I wouldn't be surprised if corporate desktops switch to Edge and (Firefox or Brave). If techies can't make Chrome palatable for themselves, they are going to be constantly telling people, "I don't use Chrome". Techies may not hold budgets, but they do have influence.

If your head's not in the cloud, you're not in the right place

P. Lee
Mushroom

Re: Sounds like a cry for help.

You do need to set up cloud very well, but most people don't need much of it. If you have that scale, you can probably afford the tin to run it on.

It seems to me that limiting options is the way to go. For example, you may have all the encryption protocols available to you, but the best thing to do is to pretend you don't and have an "encryption on/off" option. That enables automation as consistency improves.

Do the cloud model - bang-for-buck hardware and modular infrastructure. You don't need an F5, you may need multi-tier haproxy.

The other thing to do is enforce standards. e.g. No-one deploys anything to production in a non-automated fashion. That means you force scripted builds.

The cloud has some very nice features, but mostly its about imposing discipline. You can easily do cloud wrong and make it awful.

Seeing as everyone loves cloud subscriptions, get ready for car-as-a-service future

P. Lee

Re: F*** right off

That's not the only problem. GPS seems to fail with lots of tall buildings close-by.

P. Lee
Terminator

Re: Paying to beta test

I beg to differ. The existing cloud services companies are well ahead of the curve when it comes to shonky business practises - unilateral and retroactive on the fly license/ToS changes.

The economic driver for services is not the same between larger corporations and individuals. The tax model encourages businesses to go for opex over capex and when they need something, they need it to be available or risk revenue. This isn't true for most individuals. They might go for a video streaming subscription because the cost is inconsequential and there are ongoing beneficial updates in the form of new content, but I don't think that model translates to cars. The payments are large which means people start doing the maths and many people do look at how much they can sweat the asset. The viable target market is the people who buy a new car every three years. I don't think that's most people.

NVMe over Ethernet is the future. And that's how we roll – Tegile

P. Lee

Re: Naive question

Indeed. Just because you've got Ethernet doesn't mean you need IP.

We've had ATA over Ethernet for years.

Ethernet wins on price due to production economies of scale and competition in a commodity market.

P. Lee

Re: even better

It seems for most people the problem is the high cost of administration skills. For most applications, the performance requirements are not a great concern.

Judging by the success of the cloud, simple point and click interfaces with minimal technical skill required are the way forward. Hyper-fast hardware is just a way to make that happen. If I have to think about how much stuff I need and get some techie work it all out and put physical storage in a server, its going to cost more than expensive hardware, especially if I have to do that for online storage, backup, compute and networking.

The result is nvme storage pools with multiple 100G links, Epyc CPUs and the cloud.

Yes, we want the fastest storage possible, but only if its flexible. DAS may have the edge on speed, but its quite a niche use-case.

It isn't usually about speed for a particular application, its about the ability to carve up the resources we have in an arbitrary fashion to meet changing needs without hiring expensive staff.

Good news: Jeff Bezos went to space. Bad news: He's back

P. Lee

Re: Oh dear

Female Astronaut Meme:

Houston, we have a problem.

- Roger, what's your situation?

Ah, don't worry about it.

- Please confirm the issue

Nothing's wrong.

- Are you sure?

Its fine.

Cut us some Slack: $27bn+ later, collab tool officially belongs to Salesforce

P. Lee

Re: Teams is "free"

I'm not sure office doc compatibility is much of an issue any more for inter-company use. Most IT Security policies frown on such sharing.

MS Office is better than LibreOffice. They question is whether the cost is worth it, and that will depend on your use-cases.

My inclination would be to put LibreOffice everywhere and then offer MSOffice if people can make a business case for it.

I will say this though - the LibreOffice interface style looks horrific - random font sizes and colours in the icons - its a mess - but again, how much do you want to spend to fix it?

P. Lee

Ah Sharepoint. Turning perfectly good desktop applications like Excel into latency-bound crud.

I think its just a psyop to make web-based excel look like a viable alternative.

AWS gave Parler a chance, won't say if it talked to NSO before axing spyware biz's backend systems

P. Lee

Re: The two are not equivalent

Gab is doing just fine.

The reason its doing fine is that it doesn't rely on Big Tech. Parler tried go up against the cartel, while using the cartel's services.

AWS provided an excuse for its actions, not a reason. I'm not even sure Section 230 would apply to databases and content moderation as practised by the big tech cartel has practically nothing to do with illegal content.

P. Lee

Re: The two are not equivalent

Parler's content didn't even break AWS' ToS. The allegation was that they may not be able to comply in the future.

Parler failed to learn the lessons of Gab and died because of it.

Those lessons are generally applicable:

- Don't rely on the services of those who hate you.

- If you don't own the infrastructure of your business, it can be taken from you.

- "Cloud" is not a commodity, it is proprietary, and it isn't yours.

Have you tried turning server cores off and on again? HPE wants to do it for you from GreenLake

P. Lee

Re: Maybe new on intel

"You'll own nothing and be happy about it."

- World Economic Forum/Davos Billionaires' Club: "Build Back Better"

P. Lee

Re: Maybe new on intel

Checkpoint used to do it for their firewalls. I'm not sure what the current state is.

Campaigners warn of an 'algorithm-driven censorship' future if UK Online Safety Bill gets through Parliament

P. Lee

Re: Look at last time.

Relocate to Florida - now more Texan than Texas.

Based Grandma will save you!

P. Lee

Re: An old joke

Particular party affiliation is not a prerequisite for stupidity.

Never trust people who want more control over you.

P. Lee

Re: End of internet for all

Much of both parties have gone Left.

Dump the Woke - I don't care what party they're in.

Advert for coronavirus 'destroying' air 'purifier' exterminated by UK watchdog

P. Lee

Its easy

Just put a mask over the purifier vent.

Because that would be effective, right?

Twitter: Our AI image-cropping algorithm is biased toward White people, women

P. Lee
Facepalm

Twitter is shocked to realise that AI learns from the data it is given!

In other Twitter news... GIGO

Microsoft customers locked out of Teams, Office, Xbox, Dynamics – and Azure Active Directory breakdown blamed

P. Lee

Re: I guess they are going to miss their SLA?

Many of the difficulties in creating cloud services are due to them being cloud services. If I’m fine with two little DC’s, why would I care if running a mega-scale cloud is hard? Smaller systems have lower complexity, which is more manageable.

Why would MS care about SLAs? If you’ve bought into AAD, you can’t take your business elsewhere.

US Office of National Intelligence says Russia, Iran tried to mess with 2020 elections, China sat it out

P. Lee

News at Ten

Administration of new president says election was totally legit while installing massive fortifications around his office and putting tens of thousands of troops between himself and his adoring supporters.

China does nothing since multinational companies with manufacturing bases in China don’t need to be asked - they know where their interests lie.

Also, media companies supporting him (who happen to get income from aforesaid multinationals) put no credence in photographs of his family doing drugs with hookers.

So that’s fine.

And yes, when we’re talking about a country which runs concentration camps, I’m for division, not unity.

End is nigh for iMac Pro as Apple stops offering custom configs of high-spec desktop

P. Lee

Re: The iMac was Pro in name only

I was under the impression that much of the M1 performance was gained by putting everything on-chip. It will be interesting to see if they can provide upgradable ram and graphics if they have a variety of external GPUs etc.

Australian government fights Facebook news ban by threatening 0.01% of Zuck's ad revenue

P. Lee

Australia: Stop people posting links on your platform for free!

FB: ok

Australia: Why can’t people post links on your platform?!

helloSystem: Pre-alpha FreeBSD project chases simplicity and elegance by taking cues from macOS

P. Lee

Re: Further simplicity and ease of use...

Do NOT search for “gimp”

That’s a good enough reason to start moving away from the name.

Google's Git commits point to project on pared-back Android for virtualized environments

P. Lee

Re: Android Virtualization

>I assume one could also use Google sync functions to transfer contacts or other data into a virtualized app running in this virtualized space too.

If you sync the data, what's the point?

Google Play goes in this container. All my stuff goes in the non-Google container.

Robinhood plays Sheriff of Nottingham as it pauses GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry etc stock sales, gets sued

P. Lee

Re: bots

Any lawsuit will be peanuts in comparison.

More importantly, Robinhood can take the hit for “the team” because it can go under in a lawsuit, the customers get almost nothing, and the execs can be compensated by the hedge funds, who just want the trading to stop.

Corrupt to the core.

What happens when the internet realizes the stock market is basically a casino? They go shopping at the Mall

P. Lee

Re: The money has to come from somewhere

It isn’t quite a pump and dump. Of course its a bubble, but how much of a bubble depends on the size of the hedge fund short.

My understanding is that the short was huge, so the hedge fund has to buy the stock it borrowed at whatever the market rate is. The bubble will last until the hedge fund buys enough stock to fulfill its obligation to return the stock it shorted. The Redditers aim is to sell the stock to the hedge fund.

The money comes from the hedge fund which has to liquidate other assets to pay for the stock at a particular time. It isn’t pure speculation, like the original short, the tulip, south-seas, or like high-frequency trading.

I hear that miraculously the Reddit board was shut down for “hate speech”. What a handy tool that is. Never misused for political or financial purposes.

I believe Soros used a similar technique to shorting in the currency markets (betting the government wouldn’t be able to prop up the pound) when forcing the UK out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and made himself an extra billion or so.

Two clichés, one headline: 'No good deed goes unpunished' and 'It's always DNS'

P. Lee

Never break a client’s procedures

Do not start changes early. CAB won’t have accounted for that and you may break someone else’s change or testing.

Have a test plan. This includes testing the broken and fixed functionality pre and post change.

Any decent organization will have the help desk log the start and end of changes. Always ask them for permission to start work and have them update the change to “in progress”.

If you finish early, you just tell people it’s still being tested and you don’t mark it as complete until the users have told you it’s working.

Apple reportedly planning to revive the MagSafe charging standard with the next lot of MacBook Pros

P. Lee

Re: Wish list

While the ram upgrade might be nice, I’m guessing just wacking in 16g will be fine for almost everyone.

Amd and intel could offer this for laptop cpus and get much of the same gains.

At the current level of laptop maturity I suspect you’d outgrow the ram and cpu at the same time.

Non-upgradable drives are a terrible evil though, especially since they wear out.

Salesforce relieves Republican National Committee of its tools citing 'risk of politically incited violence' across the US

P. Lee

Re: US came within inches of losing democracy

ChooChoo! All aboard the Biden Train!

Next Stop: the Chinese Market, via Purchased President. Runs express through US Workers.

Four women seek release from forced arbitration to sue Infosys for widespread gender discrimination

P. Lee

Re: Typical Indian male behavior

While I agree, I also notice that Indian boys are absolutely doted on by their parents whereas the girls are not. This produces spoiled brats.

Look at the social and financial systems at play in India. Without masses of birth-control, men are the income earners. The more boys you have, the wealthier the family will be. The girls will marry into someone-else's family.

Before we judge that society too harshly, remember what birth control has done in the West - our society is dying off as we fail to even replace our population.

Maybe patriarchy is a sign of a thriving, successful society ;)

Flash in the pan: Raspberry Pi OS is the latest platform to carve out vulnerable tech

P. Lee

Re: Attaching a tractor-fed Epson LX-80 dot matrix impact printer was the height of luxury

Connecting a device, which rarely sees updates but does see all your important documents, to the internet and is on 24/7. What could possibly go wrong?

But yes, LX80... FX-80... Printshop and banner makers.... a terrible time for printing, but the computers were fun.

Pirate Bay co-founder criticises Parler for its lack of resilience

P. Lee

Re: Easy solution

A lot of people have had to move to subscribestar a Russian credit card payment facility because the land of the free isn't so much anymore.

P. Lee

Re: Geeks versus Politicians

> Delegitimating the electoral process

You mean like questioning the legitimacy of Trump's 2016 election victory? Something that went on for four years? You are allowed to question that all you like.

If you question Biden's election victory your posts will be auto-banned by the legacy social media.

Rules for thee...

China showing signs of brewing IPv6 eruption

P. Lee

Perhaps because that huge market pushes western corporations to cater for IPv6 which means we get to use the nice new toys too.