If....
AI "data" (really compute) centers follow the example of Mad King Elon's RacistAI™ farms, high-demand power falls back on rows of methane-powered generators. Swell (not).
Posts by Joe Gurman
788 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007
Datacenters are hoarding grid power just in case, says Uptime Institute
Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out
De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now
Monday 10th November 2025 19:51 GMT
Microsoft….
…. probably didn’t sue any of the originators of the distros because they remembered how they got off scot free when Apple, with considerable justification, tried to sue them for the visual language in the Windows desktop, stolen directly from the Mac OS of the day (System some-number-or-other).
SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew
Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million
Friday 7th November 2025 17:38 GMT
And people….
Study after study has shown that human (admin) costs for Windows are way higher per seat than for macOS seats. Whether that’s true for systems used as servers, I don’t know, but based on my own experiences ~ 7 years ago and earlier, it at least held true fir our mix of server and desktop deployments. The Linux per-system cost for admin appeared to be similar to the Mac cost for servers, but my experience was limited, so it’ll have to remain “appeared” until I read a credible study.
Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch
Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet
Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide
Monday 13th October 2025 16:21 GMT
Copious amounts of salt....
....should probably be applied, as jamf is an app for managing groups of Macs, but they're claiming, as the internal user IT group at IBM did a decade or so ago when they started allowing users to decide between Macs or PC/Windows for use on the job, that the life cycle costs (initial purchase plus support) is lower for Macs in enterprise deployments. the basic argument, as I recall from the IBM slide set, was that is took ~ 1/3 the number of IT professionals to care and feed Mac users as a similar number of PC users. And people, as we all know, are a lot more expensive, year by year, than whatever a laptop or desktop costs.
https://www.jamf.com/blog/total-cost-of-ownership-mac-versus-pc-in-the-enterprise/
London cops unplug iPhone crime ring said to nick 40% of city's mobiles
Wednesday 8th October 2025 21:29 GMT
And yet
“We're calling on phone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung to do more to support us and protect their customers – especially around phone security and reuse.”
And yet the article glaringly fails to mention that the intercepted package was found because an owner of one of the purloined iPhones had Find My enabled on the device, and was able to direct police to its location.
AI agent hypefest crashing up against cautious leaders, Gartner finds
Blood-red bot stalks the burbs armed with . . . groceries
Wednesday 1st October 2025 15:31 GMT
Can't wait for the hilarity that will ensue....
....should DD deploy these in my neighborhood: the young, stupid males with minimally souped-up cars with abnormally loud exhausts who like to vroom-vroom and screech-screech on the public roads will no doubt compete to see who can punt the red blobs the farthest.
Submarine cable security is all at sea, and UK govt 'too timid' to act, says report
Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe
Dell enters the earbud market with kit you can control from the cloud
Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find
Friday 26th September 2025 18:56 GMT
Dang
I’m retired now, but I spent a measurable part of my three decades at my last employer’s talking back to piss-poor mangers in public. At least prior to the current US administration, that was not a firing offense. Indeed, it appeared to improve morale among both the decent managers and all the rest of us.
British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown
Cybercriminals pwn 850k+ Americans' healthcare data
French jet left circling while Corsican controller caught Zs
How and why Linux has thrived after three decades in Kernelland
Two Scattered Spider teens charged over attack on London’s transport network
Thursday 18th September 2025 16:09 GMT
Re: Neglect
I didn’t see anything indicating they were being prosecuted for being geniuses. The prosecution was brought based on evidence that they had broken one or more laws. Whether the people responsible for “critical national infrastructure” should be legally liable for shoddy ITsec is something else entirely.
In the meantime, the two alleged perps were remanded in custody, awaiting further court appearances. May be some time before they walk, or crack, free.
‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line
Friday 12th September 2025 16:40 GMT
Re: progression or lack of
Considering the incredibly obsolete systems that particular tax outfit depends on, it's probably just as well they don't try to recruit managers from outside.... they'd probably be liable for injuries incurred by interviewees tripping on the first step in their terrified rush out the door.
Friday 12th September 2025 16:37 GMT
Some truth, some obvious lies
The "I manage people, not content" line stems from the immediate post-WW II dictum, supposedly originating at Harvard Business School, that a good manager could manage anything: the students needed to learn how to manage, not any of the semi-infinite types of business they's all go on to manage in their careers.
Evidently, Steve Jobs Mark I bought into that philosophy when he recruited John Sculley, who'd spent the previous 17 years of his life selling (in Jobs's own words) sugared water and buying advertising prices ~ a factor of ten higher than his competitors'. It was never clear that Sculley understood the personal computer business, nor Apple's niche in it. Differences of opinion with SJ M I led to Jobs's departure and the founding of NeXT.
Apple's board ditched Sculley and hired Michael Spindler, who had excellent credentials (DEC, Intel, President of Apple Europe) but figured that the only way to reign in losses was to fire as many people as possible, and then try to sell the company (to IBM, Sun, or Philips). He lasted less than three years before the Apple board canned him.
Then came Gil Amelio, a guy who knew computer hardware from the ground up (Bell Labs, Fairchild, Rockwell, National Semiconductor) as well as having a Ph.D. in physics. You know, a smart guy. Yet he spent months trying to lowball the price of BeOS, failed, and then contributed his one historical decision: buying NeXT for twice what he'd tried to offer Be. In less than 18 months after starting as Apple CEO, Amelio was out on his ear, thank to Jobs's lobbying the board. The rest, as they say, is history — but remember that beyond soldering, Jobs's hardware experience was extremely limited, and it was his partnership with Wozniak that jump-started the company and the industry. Jobs should be respected for interesting himself in the hardware just enough to allow him to pursue one product vision after another. Those may be visions that most people reading this site mock, but that punters literally lined up in mall hallways and on city streets to turn over their hard-earned <insert currency name here> to buy. Jobs never knew everything about the technologies that went into his "magical" devices, but he was intellectually curious enough to learn what he needed to know about them to make superior (as measured by sales) products. and let's face it, in the business world, it's only the bottom line that matters.
After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus
White House nixes NASA unions amid budget uncertainty
Online property ad reveals looted Nazi war art, triggers police raid
xAI fires legal rocket at Apple and OpenAI claiming they're locking out Grok
Tuesday 26th August 2025 15:23 GMT
Re: Accolades. Superior features...
All human beings are creatures of habit. Get one of them used to their every whim being fulfilled by suckups and misguided women willing to be impregnated by the serial big daddy, and it's very hard for that human to recall that there was ever a different way of life. Hopefully, the Starship that takes the Mad King to Mars will be large enough to accommodate a sufficient number of sycophants and uterus-for-hires to satisfy his bipolar wishes.
Two wrongs don’t make a copyright
New Yorkers will soon be able to yell 'I'm walkin here!' to Waymo robotaxis
Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker
IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4
Thursday 21st August 2025 16:57 GMT
Out of curiosity
To what degree does an IPv6 implementation of “an upstream router” handling all address allocation replicate the security function of NAT on a home ‘v4 network? I recall that some years ago, v6 went from “no obfuscation” to “some obfuscation, if desired,” but I don’t know where that stands now.
US spy chief claims UK backed down over Apple backdoor demand
Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results
Monday 18th August 2025 16:11 GMT
Re: You
Or I suppose they could have looked at the connectors on the drive and the receptacles on the rackmount system and figured out what went (and didn’t go) where. But I guess that’s the sort of thing that some fraction (guessing ~ 80% for males in their maximum testosterone years) are only capable of learning the hard way.
Law and water: Russia blamed for US court system break-in and Norwegian dam drama
Datacenter diplomacy: Australia commits to help Vanuatu build bit barns
Desktops and printers in coffee shops? Starbucks Korea tells customers to 그만 해
I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11
Thursday 14th August 2025 11:24 GMT
Just a speculation
Here in the US, there’s been a “ Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act” (HIPAA) on the books since 1996. Prior to that, the author’s urgent care facility was very unlikely to have been able to access MGH’s or any other medical facility’s records — but it was only able to do so in 2025 because the author had to fill out/assent to some printed forms that allowed the urgent care outfit to access his HIPAA-protected records. MGH may or may not have digitized its patient records prior to 1996, when the HIPAA clock started ticking, but eventually it had no choice, just as it had no choice but to insure the security of those data (well, OK, who knew from zero-days when that law was written?). Thus the paperwork I feel certain the author had to deal with before he could receive treatment in 2025, just as I do every time I visit a medical facility here.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
