Posts by mikus

Broadcom has won. 70 percent of large VMware customers bought its biggest bundle

Vmware's user base was always the simpleton Windows admins too scared to play with Linux by itself, so no surprised they'd let themselves be strong-armed into another abusive relationship already after Dell/EMC.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Anyone on Gnome team actually use Nvidia?

I have to assume those quick to move toward abandoning X11 for Wayland do NOT use Nvidia, as Nvidia drivers have been mostly rubbish for any Linux Wayland desktops until quite recently, and then still iffy at that. With the dominance of Nvidia in the GPU market share, x11 won't die until Nvidia finally makes drivers work right for it. Because Nvidia has already said there is no major priority for them to support all the graphics features needed for Wayland, it will remain a second-class citizen, thus any distro and desktop that moves away from X11 is directly tying their success to Nvidia to fix their drivers long-term.

As a KDE user, it's made Wayland mostly unusable until the latest beta 570 drivers for me, to the point I'm look at my next system being AMD. Trying one of the latest KDE Plasma desktops, kernels, and drivers with Wayland got me at least 6 crashes in 24 hours, but otherwise rock solid on x11. Have fun Gnome team.

OpenAI to charge $200 per month for ChatGPT Pro

It's $200 to talk to the smart one, or you get the dummy.

I'd mostly given up on using gpt4 for doing complex development as it's forgetful and annoyingly so. Using o1 was refreshingly intelligent and usable, until it's not. I don't want to talk to the simpleton version that forgets every few sentences, I'd rather have the smart one.

Oh, that's $200 dollars, a month... I'll get back to you on that.

No, Broadcom did not just end VMware's flagship VCDX certification program

Yet another cert offically useless

This can be up there with your Netware certifications, and MSDE! Like the IT tramp stamps.

Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

When has ANYONE EVER seen a successful or *good* Oracle deployment?

What happens when you take the most technologically disinclined part of your business and clash directly with complex software, technology, and clueless consulting/outsourcing? Miserable failure, always.

Now add Oracle being an unmitigated disaster to work with as a company and a solution.

Six IT contractors accused of swindling Uncle Sam out of millions

"There is no place for fraudsters and crooks scheming to manipulate the government bidding process for personal gain."

Too bad everyone in government does exactly that eventually, usually equally for good or bad. IT procurement systems are so dysfunctional either way they end up having to game the system to get anything done, it's just down to the nature of the managers whether they use them for good or bad.

Starlink was offered for free to those hit by Hurricane Helene. It is not entirely free

First hit is always free.

Same as it's always been.

Workday beats Oracle and Microsoft in UK 'Matrix' ERP deal

Anything but Oracle

After decades of hating Oracle, I can imagine any and every consumer of the product with a need for ERP would rather have the devil they don't know vs. the one they do.

The only people like anything Oracle are the ones that make money from selling it, certainly not using it.

About a quarter million Comcast subscribers had their data stolen from debt collector

Re: Two things...

It was probably the history of ANYONE ever across time that has ever been delinquent with comcast that they sold the bill to those guys to collect on.

What do bill collectors know about IT security? The owner's kid runs the bill payment website from his house. They're akin to used car salesmen and 20x worse for the nature of doing bill collections.

Musk's Starlink rockets to 4 million subscribers

Helps when military adoption takes off for drones

Since finding these in use in Russian and only who knows what other types of intercontinental weaponry used globally, business is good for Musk.

Samsung fined just $8K for exposing chip fab workers to X-ray radiation

At this point the Samsung leadership could go straight Jeffrey Epstein, raping and pillaging on live TV and the Korean government would be ok with it, or a small fine like this. It's just how the Chaebol's roll.

Apple's latest macOS release is breaking security software, network connections

If microsoft did this, they'd be up for regulatory action against them, but since *only* apple, it is glossed over. This is exactly what Microsoft had their little private security conference to discuss how to better windoze security, but not fsck over all the vendor - apple simply didn't care to fsck them over.

Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after

Having worked for dozens of companies consulting over the years, I can say from experience orgs with Teams, it's always an unhappy place that people only use when necessary, and act like big brother is always watching. Slack orgs actually like to communicate and do so freely, spawning non-work interest chat for mutual hobbies, and in general is a much friendlier experience.

Not to mention if you use Teams on anything NOT windows, the experience is downright miserable as anything Microsoft on non-Microsoft devices.

I actually quit a job once because they moved to Teams, or at the time OCS, as it simply didn't work with Linux which I use, so it hobbled my ability to work effectively there.

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

Oh yeah, Larry Ellison has always been the caring and philanthropic type, sure he will.

Over his cold, dead hands I'm sure.

Microsoft hosts a security summit but no press, public allowed

Microsoft is in a rock and hard place here, either they boot out of the kernel 3rd parties and anger every AV vendor, again, not to mention regulators that force them to allow compatibility, or they are forced to create a new way to allow visibility for these products to work, and anger every AV vendor to re-engineer their software and probably reduce effectiveness.

The one product that won't be impacted is Microsoft's own product Defender for sure, and who will be able to compete with native solutions afterwards?

Either way this is going to probably up-end the "make microsoft secure again" party and cause riots of everyone vs Microsoft, so of course they didn't want publicity for the sh*t show.

House to grill CrowdStrike exec on epic IT meltdown... no, not the CEO

Blame Microsoft, not Crowdstrike

The reasons all AV software is so fragile is that to protect Windows as a perpetually insecure operating system with new exploits found weekly, and they can only protect so closely to the OS kernel that runs the entire thing before they end up destabilizing it accidentally as we saw. Even when they orgs use endpoint security on Windows, it's still not a guarantee to protect the OS and users. Almost every security software has had their Windows enterprise-breaking moment they've done the same prior, only now with the market dominance of Crowdstrike among enterprises, it was far more pronounced.

At this point enough windows source code has leaked over the years or employees leaving after having been exposed to it, and with Microsoft being hamstrung by billions of lines of legacy code across 3 decades no one even remembers now, it is no wonder how easily found new zero-day exploits are still today.

If you want secure computing, you should start with pretty much anything BUT Windows. You can only blame yourself otherwise.

Samsung boosts bug bounty to a cool million for cracks of the Knox Vault subsystem

Maybe they should hire/acquire Cellbrite?

Considering it took Israeli Cellbrite, the worlds favorite mobile malware vendor for government agencies, 40 minutes to unlock the Trump assassin's Samsung phone for the Secret Service, Samsung is obviously not paying the right people enough where other more nefarious suitors are more than willing.

Skype goes ad-free, which is unusual for Microsoft

International Markets

Seems only people still using skype are largely international, and it's probably more hassle than worth to try to keep up with locally relevant advertisements, particularly with EU cracking down on that whole exploitation of human rights thing. Besides, if you're using skype, you're using windows, so they'll just feed you the ad to your desktop anyways!

Kamala Harris's $7M support from LinkedIn founder comes with a request: Fire Lina Khan

Keep it classy Microsoft!

If Harris doesn't take the bribe, I'm sure they'll find another suitably purchasable politician or 100's that will. You know the Supreme Court is always for sale at least.

You know the FTC is actually doing the right job when...

Tesla sales, market share dip in EU while other EV makers grow

Now everyone knows Musk is a twit

Give the man a soap box to hang himself. Some $44B later, done!

Apple reverses course to approve Epic Games Store on iOS in EU

Epic has themselves become a thing to hate these days, but I love seeing them make Apple squirm.

Imagine that, a government with power over corporations. If only such a thing were possible in the US now.

VMware license changes mean bare metal can make a comeback through 'devirtualization', says Gartner

It's funny a company like Broadcom can be so single-handedly polarizing. They're behemoths that drive probably 70% or higher of the Ethernet switching world, but they're just so terrible with anything software, much like Cisco was/is. They bough bad software companies and made them worse with CA and Symantec, the dregs of the enterprise industry at that point in their lives, but buying VMware everyone knew it would be bad - and is!

VMware is used by enterprise shops with more money and bad admins than management brainpower, usually windows shops that are too scared of linux to use it natively, and Broadcom is betting that those customers are so bad they'll take a good reaming to not complain too much, only they are now. What are windows monkeys to do, actually have to use HyperV finally?!

If Hock Tan throws a dog a bone, he doesn't want to know if it tastes good or not.

Microsoft blamed for million-plus patient record theft at US hospital giant

Two words, Internet Explorer

For 25 years, Microsoft pushed the most commonly abused malware engine as Internet Explorer, at its core ActiveX as part of their own dotnet programming languages, ever to be unleashed on the populace, and only then begrudgingly admit to defeat in killing it off having found better adware and tracking in Google's Chrome engine now. Exchange servers are still a constant liability people misuse and abuse, and Active Directory every time remains the common denominator at the heart of most infections due to it's ubiquitous presence in 99% of enterprises today.

If people haven't learned by now to mistrust Microsoft products, they impose their own blissful ignorance.

Apple Intelligence won't be available in Europe because Tim's terrified of watchdogs

Good thing the US and most of the world have no privacy protections, or Apple would run out of new ideas to exploit the populations quickly.

Uncle Sam sanctions Kaspersky's top bosses – but not Mr K himself

I wonder what happens when a nation admits Israel hits war crime status and they have to extricate Israeli technology from government and businesses. They make all the best government malware too, drat.

Intel interrupts work on $25B Israel fab, citing need for 'responsible capital management'

Since they leveled Gaza, maybe Intel is going to make a lowball bid on all that cheap land instead now for their "luxury research park".

Salesforce expects lowest quarterly growth in two decades

Same stench as Oracle or SAP

Salesforce is like the lesser evil of that world that they with Oracle and SAP all divvy up. Even Slack's acquisition can't make them great again as a cool kid, as most of the user base that would use SF just uses Microsoft Teams by default, and people are already over the hype of AI replacing humans to improve their bottom line.

Nvidia faces local competition for its 'China special' GPUs

About those ships circling Taiwan like sharks...

Nvidia will be *the* Chinese GPU if/when they finally invade and take over Taiwan. Let's see how those tariffs and technology bans work when reversed on the western world.

Aghast iOS users report long-deleted photos back from the dead after update

When I met my SO 10 years ago, she used an old iphone, and said it was telling her it was full, even though she had deleted everything. I told her it probably was making shadow copies of everything, and it was. After some googling, I found that the only way to delete them was funny enough to use linux to connect over usb (windows drivers disallowed something needed), and use a special tool built to access and delete files for that exact reason. This fixed her problem, but she asked what the heck, and I told her it's so the government and hackers could make sure to get a copy of her naked pics in perpetuity. She changed to Android shortly after that.

Apple is a cult, you're either in, or you're not.

Brit publishers beg Apple not to hurt online ad revenue

When advertisers whine, you know someone is doing something right for consumers.

There is no good reason NOT to block ads, you are literally opening yourself to exploit if you don't. Using the internet without an ad blocker is downright disgusting, I don't know how or why people ever would.

Cloudflare CEO sues over free-roaming fidos at his ski resort paradise

Another bilionare building his doomsday palace, non-privileged humans do not belong

He's building his secret villain/zombie-survival lair underground, he shouldn't hear the dogs anyways. Bad as Zuck buying up his Hawaii survival layer and displacing all the natives like a good colonization strategy.

Banned Nvidia GPUs sneak into sanction-busting Chinese servers

So how's the sanctions working out?

You know there's people flying into China each with like 10x H100's sewed into their trenchcoats. Good thing they don't weigh people for flights.

Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director

What is surprising is that people are only now realizing just how bad Microsoft really is.

Just look at the history of Internet Explorer, where Microsoft crammed it down everyone's throat, and then left it perpetually open to exploit to hackers for it's entire lifecycle via ActiveX, their own programming framework pushed to businesses to use heavily. It wasn't until literally the rest of the world moved on to Chrome or Firefox (after choking out Netscape) that they eventually stopped, but now has the same thing via Edge, their Chrome-based but Microsoft-tainted clone in an attempt to stay relevant.

Exchange server, their at one-time almost ubiquitous business email server solution as well has been under perpetual attack and exploit for it's entire lifecycle, so much so their "solution" was to move everyone to Office365 email services to finally get them to stop people buying it and kill off the product. Still many organizations run Exchange, generally poorly, and particularly now suffer constant exploit by nation-state actors.

Thanks for the lulz Microsoft, jokes on your customers.

Sacramento airport goes no-fly after AT&T internet cable snipped

Redundancy

Well rather lack thereof.

It's only an airport, why would they have redundant providers? Not like it's important or anything.

Microsoft claims it didn't mean to inject Copilot into Windows Server 2022 this week

Typical "opps" from Microsoft.

Opps, we accidentally installed our new AI product. But since it's there, you should totally try it!

Opps, we accidentally defaulted your browser to Edge/Internet Explorer.

Opps, we accidentally upgraded you to Windows 8/10/11.

Change Healthcare’s ransomware attack costs edge toward $1B so far

Rase Premiums

Their customers will be the ones to pay for their own stupidity and laziness, not them. They obviously learned nothing after the first, paid the ransom like a fine, and went back to operating poorly. Now they got got again.

Hopefully the CIO and CISO were at least fired as part of this.

Microsoft gives Hyper-V ceilings a Herculean hike

This is Microsoft's way of trying to remind people they still make a hypervisor, same way they beg you not to download Chrome when it's the only thing you use IE/Edge for. Most well-heeled Microsoft-y admins pay VMWare today for *good* virtualization, but with Broadcom pissing on everyone now, they need another easy button since being allergic to Linux usually. Anyone that isn't afraid of Linux will just use KVM or KVM-based solutions.

Change Healthcare faces second ransomware dilemma weeks after ALPHV attack

Re: Let that be a lesson

Likely by the same incompetent CISO/CIO's that allow this sort of thing to happen under their watch fearful for their own careers.

Like the Solarwinds CISO getting sued for gross negligence, Change Healthcare's management should as well, first for being lazy/stupid to let it happen in the first place, for even considering paying the fine let alone doing so as they did, and for letting it happen AGAIN not learning from the first.

Organizations like these are so broken it's laughable, but this is how most run businesses operate still I deal with in consulting still in 2024.

Guess what everyone, medical insurance rates are going up again to pay for their mistakes. North Korea thanks you for your continued support.

Microsoft unbundling Teams is to appease regulators, not give customers a better deal

Maybe now companies will stop defaulting to using Teams because their IT team was too lazy to search for a better solution.

Microsoft Teams decouples from Office 365 suite globally

Silly Microsofties always see Team is some kinds of gift of cheapness vs. say Slack, but there are hidden costs.

-Teams group chats are as barren as catholic confession stands these days.-

-Everyone is afraid to be logged saying something bad, so they say nothing. Nothing.

-When you do use it, it's always just a little bit broken for inexplicable reasons, regardless the client platform.

-Abandoning 3rd parties like Mac and Linux to web put them as a less than 3rd class citizen alienate an already hateful crowd everywhere.

Now I wonder the true cost of using the platform decoupled from ambiguity, let us finally have a real cost of using sub-standard "freemium" services where only sacrificing human souls to converse.

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

First hit is always free-ish.

Enslaving a new generation, why not? Or people could just use LibreOffice, a perfectly usable solution to replace Office for the past 20 years already.

I've been working/consulting in enterprise IT space and have used Linux for the past 25 years, where 20 of that full-time personally using a Linux desktop, LibreOffice has always been exceedingly just fine to use, and something I use daily. People need for day to day probably 5% of what any office-suite does, and for that most any other solution is fine, and open-source is best for trust. After using LibreOffice/OpenOffice for so long, moving back to real MS Office on a customer provided device annoys me greatly.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

Apple mostly spit in the face of the EU's plans to corral them into playing fair, hopefully they respond in kind. If Apple is simply going to play this cat and mouse game, EU should simply ban their sales until they come in good faith and not some passive aggressive at best flaunting of their market power.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

All this means is they used the cheapest grade of stainless possible vs actual quality stuff that is truly corrosion-resistant. I wondered if something like this would happen, and simply laughing that yes, like most cheap Chinese "stainless" things you get from amazon or wish with low-grade metals, they corrode/rust about as bad as steel.

What Microsoft's latest email breach says about this IT security heavyweight

Same as it ever was

When will people stop being surprised Microsoft is this inept? Have we not seen almost 30 years of security ineptitude from them from the operating system to things like internet explorer as the best malware delivery engine of all time? If anyone gets into your network, it's 99% of the time going to be via a windows box, active directory, or crappy 3rd party application built for them.

These reports going public are now only since they "have to" report these sorts of breaches, as they can't trust their secret won't be leaked by the instigating hacking crew to shame them and put them in a compliance situation. They will however downplay the severity as much as they can to placate the user base back to blissful ignorance, and hide any unnecessarily embarrassing details.

Just imagine how often this has happened over the past 30 years they haven't told you about publicly since ransomware and exfiltration has become more common that they have to?

John Deere tractors get connectivity boost with Starlink deal

All new ways to let janky ass corporations control your data.

Cloudflare defends firing of staffer for reasons HR could not explain

As an Account Manager, they have quotas, and they are essentially disposable sales drones. Either you close deals, or you don't and eventually get fired. They obviously didn't, regardless of how many they had "in the works". After 25 years in IT, I see AM's come and go each year from my vendors, I rarely see the same one more than a year at a time. Then I see them at another vendor asking me to buy their product from there next.

This is the nature of a job in sales - either she's naive, inexperienced, or simply being petulant to expect anything else if she's not closing deals to their liking.

Sadly IT sales is a job where the more attractive they are is directly proportional to how much they sell. When most in the IT industry is male, females are hired as Account Managers as customer doors magically open for them and calls are taken. When do you ever see a male AM? You don't, that's why they pair them with a Systems Engineer that actually knows the products they're selling. If she's not closing deals, well maybe she needs a boob job, or a different career. Might as well call the job a modeling career.

Nvidia readies downgraded chips for China, but will anyone want to buy them?

I suspect they'll probably ship standard hardware and attempt to cripple it via firmware as they've done before (remember the crypto hashing restrictions?), in which case once received someone in China will magically create a firmware hack to open them up entirely. Hooray, export restrictions.

With the resale and auction-style pricing for H100-style cards with scarcity, I wouldn't be surprised if China doesn't just buy what they can on the secondary market like everyone else at that point. Resellers I'm sure won't really care who's buying at ludicrous MSRP+small-fortune profits.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

I only use windoze as a runtime for Visio and Project, or other odd one-off windoze-only tasks, XP that I can with 384mb of ram and 5gb of disk was perfect. Anything after only added spyware, telemetry, and garbage I never wanted or needed.

If visio/project ran in wine, I never need windows at all, but Microsoft would never let *that* happen.

Three Chinese balloons float near Taiwanese airbase

They really mean the reunification of TSMC with China. All your GPU are belong to us!

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

At some point Russinovich has to retire, he's spent 30 years wiping microsoft's arse, he needs a break.

Maybe they can hire someone for a better idea than fix what isn't broken, ie the task bar and start menu, making them the advertisement bazaar that the start menu became when people got lazy under Ballmer. Anyone with an advertisement background should be summarily excluded.

I use windoze anything only as a hypervisor for visio, quick launches saves me most of the frustration, but think of the children.