Posts by Pascal Monett

AI bills are baffling the C-suite after shift to usage-based pricing

Good

I'm very glad CxOs are feeling the pain.

Soon, they're going to start counting the ROI on this adventure and, with a bit of luck, they're going to scream in their disappearing bonuses.

SAP snaps wallet shut for travel and hiring so it can keep shoveling cash into AI

I just love this

I love hearing about how an erstwhile corporate godzilla gets itself shrinking pains when trying to Cloud its customers without their consent.

Nvidia floats double-dipping datacenter financing scheme

40K here, 170K there

I found a quote for a Grace Blackwell desktop tower at $90K+. Even if you can expect a steep discount for ordering them in such quantities, that's still a budget in the billions.

Nice going for NVidia. They're really sweeping the AI floor for every crumb of profit.

Dev says Google warned him about account hijack – then charged him $11,000 anyway

Big Corp tells flea to pay up

That's what you get when you deal with the devil : a crooked deal.

Do No Harm ? That is sooo last millenium.

Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI

Re: Oracle balls deep in AI

I just hope it's a steel trap, with locked jaws and serrated teeth.

A 40% stock drop ?

Couldn't happen to nicer guy.

Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

Interesting

No access security on the conference room Ethernet port ? Normal, it's manglement that uses that and they're time is too important to be bothered.

60 employees with the same password ? WTF ? Was there a conference where somebody wrote on the whiteboard "winter2023!" and everyone present agreed ?

New humanoid robots from China look like creepy pop star action figures – complete with slightly dodgy lip-synch

Re: Do they have names?

Or Batty ?

Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

Re: The biter bit?

Yeah, it's called irony.

Nothing like a thief to not appreciate being thieved.

UK.gov vows to cut consultancy spending, then hands up to £350M to consultancies

"ministerial sign-off required for any consultancy spend over £600,000"

And that is going to change what, exactly ?

Just that the minister in charge is going to get also get a nice kickback.

T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware – and fighting a very familiar battle for support rights on the way out

$24 million

"$24 million for extended support covering six products, a sum it said would cover over 20 staff needed to support T-Mobile"

I would think that, for $24 million, they could hire another 20 additional staff and still come out way ahead.

Unless they're paying those staffers $1 million per year ?

Somehow, I doubt that.

Re: I haven't followed this saga closely

Apparently, Broadcom bought VMware for a hefty sum just to kill it off.

I can't understand that line of reasoning, especially since I do not see that Broadcom had any virtual machine product before that.

That's probably why I'm not CEO of a trillion-dollar company.

If I decided to spend $69 billion on acquiring a company, I'd want to get a ROI that's worth it, and not destroy the product I just spent a fortune on.

Huntress CEO says threat hunter used 'poor judgment' in alerting ransomware crim about law enforcement probe

"coached teammates on engaging with threat actors"

As in : don't do that. And if you have to tell your employees that, you need to rethink your hiring policies.

I think Folland is right : if that were a bank, there would be hell to pay.

Four years into Ukraine invasion, Russia turns influence-ops back to US and Europe

Re: making the AI seem shitty

That doesn't take a lot of work.

.NET's long-term support is not long-term enough, dev complains

Redmond says "JUMP!"

So you have to deal witth it.

Borkzilla doesn't care about your problems, it wants you to pay for every keyboard key and mouse click that you make, for the rest of time. All those legacy things that you had for free or by paying only once are being gotten rid of, for your own good, of course . . .

Even the Secret Service won't use company-issued phones

The Secret Service “concurred” with all five recommendations

As in, yeah, sure . . .

I'm still not convinced that those "attempts" were not engineered from the Oval Office.

Trump-shuttered climate change site back online in nonprofit hands

Don't know if it's a shame or a good thing

Trump is so toxic that he has even persuaded scientists that the government cannot be trusted with scientific truth.

Ex-Huntress analyst claims company insider fed info to a ransomware crim. Social media drama ensues

"radical transparency"

Why radical ?

Plain-old transparency isn't enough anymore ? If it's not radical it isn't good enough ?

Could we take a step down on the shrill train ?

Microsoft extends extended updates for Windows 10 in the most muted way imaginable

"hundreds of millions of PCs running Windows 10 remain in service"

That alone should ensure that Borkzilla continues to support the platform.

Buying a new computer these days is not a trivial affair. Datacenters are gobbling up RAM at an insane pace, upping prices for everyone. The Straight of Hormuz knock-on effects are upping prices across the board, and people have more important things to worry about than kowtowing to Redmond's artificial demands.

If Redmond won't do it on its own, a law should be passed mandating that all OS makers continue supporting all OS versions as long as the user base can be counted in a given amount of tens of millions of users, or maybe a given percentage of the total user base.

They've read the scroll thing! AI helps decipher ancient document charred by Vesuvius

Now THIS is what pseudo-AI is for

Congratulations on applying the right tool for the job.

I hope this will become the defacto template procedure on analyzing ancient scrolls from this point forward.

European Commission lines up Amazon and Microsoft for cloud gatekeeper status

gOOD

Anything that tightens the screws on Redmond is Good Thing^TM in my book.

Now to see if that decision is actually going to have any teeth.

Digital ID brain trust will meet behind closed doors as minister ducks cost questions

Ah, the government favorite : total secrecy

Just trust us, we're working on the question.

Yeah,sure. I trust you to make a complete dog's bollocks of the whole thing.

UK school’s network left wide open for invasion, student found

Okay, that is bad

But it was a school. The education system anywhere is not well known for having top-of-class IT skills.

And the guy running the network was likely a teacher with other things on his mind than security.

That's just how it is.

Companies are not looking before they're leaping into the AI playpen

Good

The more issues this AI-craze causes, the more companies will wake up to the fact that pseudo-AI does not help.

And then there's this to consider.

Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'

"Redmond insists its work is sound"

Of course its work is sound - right up until the patch comes out.

Then things start to go wrong . . .

British Home Office seeks techie to herd nearly 1,000 engineers looking after 600 systems

"you must take ultimate responsibility"

Depends, do I have complete power along with it ?

No ?

Oh, so you just want a scapegoat.

No thanks.

Anthropic reimagines Claude in Slack as nosy, always-on agentic AI coworker

Re: The spy that doesn't have to hide

Yup. Nothing like being a billionaire waving around a catchy name to blind CEOs and get them to put their top-secret, crown jewels into your hands.

Thirty years ago, if you proposed to a bank, an insurance company or any Fortune 1000 company to host their customer lists, accounting details and inner mails, you'd be fired and thrown out the door immediately.

Today, if you don't, you're considered an old curmudgeon who's not "with the times".

I can't wait for a major meltdown of a Fortune 1000 company when AI goes rogue on them.

Bold move, Cotton: Trump administration tells US techies it expects American quantum computer by 2028

He can't even keep his mouth shut over his own criminal activities.

If there is anything he can brag about, there is no way in the world he's not gonna shout it off the rooftops.

Texas lassoes massive Microsoft datacenter – and 20 years of gas turbine emissions

It's going to be real fun to watch

All those Texas bitbarns with their cosy government deals are going to be real fun when the water runs dry.

Oh, so you have a 20-year iron-clad deal on power supply ? Good for you. You don't have that deal on water supply, and the water is running out.

Can't wait to break out the popcorn.

Microsoft accidentally kills epic Outlook email threads

"something major like this completely evaded the software testing process"

But you are the software testing process.

Didn't you know ?

Anthropic's Mythos mess just keeps getting more complicated

"ninety minutes that they they received this letter and had to make a call"

That's typical Trump bullying.

Everybody else has to jump when he says so, meanwhile he's snoozing during important meetings.

The orange shitgibbon has stepped over so many lines I'm starting to wonder if there are any left.

EU won't force publishers to grant dead video games an afterlife

"intellectual property protections for creators and publishers"

What "protection" is there when the company has decided to not pursue hosting the game ?

I am fully for the ability to host my own server in order to play my local version of the game.

The only real problem with this scenario is that there will be local servers, local games and thus the possibility of hacked copies being used but, again, the company has lost interest, so, so what ?

Tensordyne makes a big bet on log math to beat Nvidia

Tempting Fate

I strongly believe that there is a great chance we off ourselves in a gigantic mushroom cloud. It's a miracle that we haven't already (and, with countries' nuclear arsenals under the control of unhinged lunatics who start wars at the drop of a hat, it's a non-negligeable possibility).

Then there's the fact that we connect everything we can to the Internet whether it's useful or not (a fridge ? a toaster ??), it's more than tempting Fate. We are actively bringing about the conditions whereby, when True AI finally attains The Singularity, it'll have everything at its electronic fingertips and will be able to manipulate those puny fleshbags into provoking their own destruction.

The only redeeming feature in all this is the basic decency of the type of person who is called upon to act in times of extreme stress. I'm obviously talking about Stanislav Petrov. The fact that a trained man used his mind instead of blindly reacting to What The Computer Says, especially in a regime where the value of human life was a secondary consideration, says volumes about how it is entirely possible that the madman in charge be thwarted by acts of humans who feel that their responsibility towards Mankind is more important than blindly following orders.

And that is our one chance of survival.

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

Yes, I am, and I said so.

It's a theoretical question.

Re: Thinking of the planet

No it is not a cooling question. Heatsinks do not use electricity.

You did not answer my question.

Re: Thinking of the planet

Indeed.

2000 phones to do computing. I wonder how much electricity that guzzles (assuming every phone is working at peak capacity all the time) ?

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

Re: put up a cone or two

You have just started a cult there, my friend.

Midjourney pivots from AI image generation to body scanning medical spa where patients bathe in 'golden light'

Golden light ? That's the solution ?

Please, nobody tell Trump else he's going to be gold-plating all the lighting in "his" hotels everywhere, then loudly and proudly proclaim that now, Trump Hotels heal you while you stay ($800/day, min 3 weeks reservation).

India blocks Telegram ahead of scandal-hit medical school entrance exam

Here's an idea

Just put a smartphone signal-blocking system in the test centers.

KDE Plasma 6.7 brings the X11 era to a close

Endless discusssion cars : start your engines !

I, for one, cannot wait to be retired to have the time to try out and finally get a grip on this wonderful, Windows-free world.

Smelly config files will make your agents waste tokens, researchers warn

Gee golly gee

Are we finally going to get around to coders who actually try to write good code, instead of just code that works ?

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

I'm sorry, aren't we talking about the All-Powerful AI ?

Isn't it supposed to be able to understand ?

Why should we need to change our ways of doing things for a machine ?

The machine is supposed to adapt to our needs, not the other way around.

Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR

"If you don’t happen to have an old CRT TV"

Please excuse the question, but who the hell still has a CRT ?

I've burned my eyes on those things for 30 years, but even for me, it has been half a decade since I replaced my absolutely gorgeous and trustworthy Phillips with a flat panel.

Given that I am basically the definition of an old curmudgeon (see icon), who is still watching anything on CRT ?

Besides, and please excuse me, but I still watch Star Trek TOS on my 5K flat screen and it looks fine to me.

Then again, my eyesight is going haywire, so maybe there is a point in this.

But I know how to program the time on my VCR.

And yes, I still have a VCR.

Now you can guess how old I am, grasshopper.

Angry bug hunter with Microsoft beef drops new Windows 0-day

Re: MS vs what?

Linux.

Get out of the swamp. There is a bright future, but it does not contain those pretty Excel charts that manglement is enamoured with.

On the other hand, it does contains stability, security and the assurance that your company does not depend on the OS of another company that is increasingly looking like a sand castle next to beach.

But hey, that's just my 2 cents.

Memory and personalization make AI more likely to tell you what you want to hear

"tell you what you want to hear"

How much longer is it going to take to end this senseless, useless waste of resources before we get back to actually working ?

Every employee’s password was stored in a single Excel file

"The CEO thought"

And that's where the problems started.

There are very, very few CEOs who have the faintest idea of the complexity and the ability of the IT their company relies on.

On the other hand, there is a legion of CEOs who believe that they only need to dictate something and it should become true.

Reality doesn't work that way.

Uncle Sam considers buying a seat on the Titanic

"the feds have invested $20.9 billion"

Funny how Republicans scream about government intervention when it's about healthcare, but when it's about handing out money to people who are already insanely rich, then it's not a problem.

Apple's Orwellian device controls for tots also mean more work for parents

"if parents wanted to spend more time on their kids"

Parents ?

What is that 20th century reference ?

Today's "parents" want to fuck like crazy (ok, I get that) and, if it just so happens that the birth control pills don't work, well, give the sprog a distraction that will allow them to continue to believe that they are actually free of responsibility.

Now get off my lawn !

It's do or die for Apple AI

Re: Time to vote

DIE !

DIE !

DIE !

Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug

Re: Not a lot of sympathy for "Evan"

If you had the proper tools and competence to do your job, he wouldn't have gotten away with it.

Don't blame consultants for the fact that your IT is a house of cards build on a sand beach by the sea.

And that is all because Manglement wants those pretty Excel charts as weekly reports.