Posts by Doogie Howser MD

AWS wins 5-year, $700m+ contract for cloud services to US Navy

$723.9m sounds like a lot

But in reality will disappear quickly if they happen to spin up DynamoDB for a few weeks usage.

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

Very inspirational.

"Beatings will continue until morale improves"

Microsoft to offer unlimited time off for US staff

It's a con

I've never worked for a company that has this policy but know some who have, and the pressure of deciding how many days PTO you are worth ultimately meant them taking fewer days than previously.

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

Oh come on!

A reason to upgrade to Windows 11 is that new PCs are "sleeker"?

Up to 18,000 Amazon workers in firing line as it chops cost

Nice vernacular

"Eliminating" people and also, WTF is "People Experience"? I yearn for the halcyon days of Personnel departments and plain language.

$20m SAP ECC replacement project delayed because UK university unsure what it wants

Re: Good call

I thought exactly the same - most times orgs just plough on regardless and hope for the best. Just goes to show though that requirements analysis is a dying art form and the cause of most public sector project failures (in my experience). Quite often the mass tangle of stakeholders don't really know what they want and end up chasing a shiny dream that just doesn't materialise, conflating functional and non-functional requirements and looking for a CV booster before they move on.

Being one of the 1% sucks if you're a Rackspace user

Poor

The fact that it seems to be small businesses bearing the brunt of this makes it even harder to accept because they are the sort of organisations who can ill afford to have a day of downtime, let alone three weeks. Rackspace has been dropping in quality like a stone for years and their indifferent response to this problem makes me want them to finally disappear into a big black hole and never surface again.

UK govt study says IR35 contractor tax reforms plain sailing for most

Re: Level playing field

IR35 was a shit show long before Sunak turned up, but just to correct you - he was elected by his constituents and made PM by his party. This is how it works in this country, for better or worse. Same rules apply to the other parties too, see Brown, G.

UK arrests five for selling 'dodgy' point of sale software

If only

The tax authorities were quite so on the ball getting money out of the likes of Amazon!

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

Regrets

Like most con artists, I suspect her real regret is getting caught, not having done it in the first place.

Twitter layoffs were bad but Meta's mass ejections could take the cake

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh

..at a company that is achingly woke but then treats its staff like absolute dirt. Typical Silicon Valley.

Forrester rates virtual machine infrastructure ‘stale or risky’

You can't take analysts opinions as gospel, those that do should be beaten. I love a bit of public cloud as much as the next man, but it has to be appropriate in the use case and be fully thought through. Talk of K8S in the article also reminds me of that XKCD strip about the use of buzz words. Just because you say it doesn't make it the silver bullet.

Finally, as for VMware not innovating as much once Broadcom take them over. Don't make me laugh, they haven't innovated in years. Like Apple, they just keep rehashing existing features and claiming "further and faster" every time.

Google CEO Pichai: We need to up productivity by a fifth

Beatings will continue until morale improves.

Microsoft extends Teams into VMware and Citrix VDI

Well fucky fucky fuck fuck.

Palo Alto bug used for DDoS attacks and there's no fix yet

Their security not getting any better

I am a subscriber to their patch update e-mails and most quarters there is yet another serious flaw to patch. For a security company, they don't seem to be that great at security.

Google Cloud growth slows, losses grow, bosses unworried

Re: So they lost less than a billion over $69.7 billion in revenue

IMO, Google Cloud is a little different from the other two. Rather than a "me too" cloud which Oracle seems to be building out, Google offers more in the way of big data services etc than the other big two.

Broadcom's stated strategy ignores most VMware customers

I wonder if VMware will become this decade's Novell?

Big Tech loves talking up privacy – while trying to kill privacy legislation

Political lobbying should be illegal

But of course that will never happen because they pour too much money into politician's pockets. For example, this week I heard Ted Cruz takes $440K from the NRA, so he's hardly likely to legislate against firearms, is he?

IT vendors set to use headline inflation to justify price hike

Yer job is going to be taken...

"There are certain sets of skills that are very high demand right now."

Liam Neeson must be raking it in.

Workday shares slide following claims Amazon ditched company-wide HR system

I wonder if the Bezos Boys will roll their own service now they've seen the competition's innards. It will be announced at Re:Invent with some quirky name and a completely unintelligible license model. Much like most of their products.

Capgemini awarded towering £600m deal to run London cops' IT infrastructure

Pig in a poke

I've seen both monolithic contracts and also the "tower" model, either way, you're never going to get the result you want. The best part of tower arrangements is that the tower owners refuse to speak to each other and/or drag their heels because it might mean them losing money further down the line. Self preservation is the most basic instinct of all.

UK's Manchester University seeks integrator to lead fiddly Oracle Financials upgrade

Cloud not optional

Based on other anecdotal evidence I've seen, MU will be strong armed into going onto OCI whether they really want to or not. Oracle are offering very "competitive" pricing to move stuff into their bit barns, past history would suggest you will be gouged in year 4 at renewal time.

All in all, make sure you know OCI if you're bidding for this.

If you can see this headline, you're certainly not reading it on Twitter: All tweets, notifications vanish

Oh well

Do people still use it for serious purposes? The bile on there is industrial in quantity and quality.

Morgan Stanley hit with $60m penalty for failing to properly decommission old kit hosting 'wealth management' data

"Morgan Stanley, which does not admit liability"

Wankers. Of course they're fucking liable (though maybe not in the jaundiced eye of the law).

With so many cloud services dependent on it, Azure Active Directory has become a single point of failure for Microsoft

There's not now and there will never be a perfect solution to this, we live in an imperfect world. Where there is networking, storage, compute and a whole gamut of plumbing from different vendors making it all work, something will break at some stage.

That being said, I remember the last fairly major Azure AD meltdown and it turned out that the bulk of requests went to a Texas DC which fell over. Since then, Microsoft claim to have improved this but remember that underneath the hood, AAD is nothing more than a custom build of ADAM. It's not the same as "conventional" AD and so the usual rules don't apply.

Some people prefer on prem, and that's fine. Some people prefer cloud, that's fine. Pick the appropriate tool for the job, don't just follow dogma.

'Robbery, economic plunder, victim of larcenous cronyism and a heist'

The nerve!

Pot, meet kettle....

Surprise! Apple launches iOS 14 today, and developers were given just 24 hours' notice

Yeah but you have to travel 250 miles from your home to use it.

Some praise for Apple (gulp)

I consider myself a big cynic of Apple, especially their "magical and revolutionary" schtick, but the main reason I moved to iPhone from Android is what is spelled out in this article - a clear lifespan for a device and regular OS updates. None of this garbage where a carrier has to certify it first and then add their own crapware.

I know we have Android One etc and Nokia kept up to date quite well, but it was still patchy in terms of device support in at timely manner.

Nvidia to acquire Arm for $40bn, promises to keep its licensing business alive

"Someday, trillions of computers running AI will create a new internet"

Meaning even more bilious shite on Twitter.

UK national debt hits 1.46 Apples – and weighs as much as 2 billion adult badgers

Re: So it goes

177K out of 320 million isn't a "huge pile", but I expected downvotes. Such is life.

So it goes

Well while world leaders continue to over react to a virus that statistically has minimal risk to the man (or woman, or gender fluid) in the street, this is bound to happen. Reverse the lockdown, manage at risk groups (mainly care home residents) and get rid of those virtue signaling, placebo based "face coverings".

'We stopped ransomware' boasts Blackbaud CEO. And by 'stopped' he means 'got insurance to pay off crooks'

Are there any ransomware or hacking attacks that aren't sophisticated? Just askin'

How Bude: Google's sole-financed private undersea pipe to make a landing in Cornwall

Missed opportunity

Should have called the cable "Vince".

Microsoft has speedy portable treats for locked-down princes and paupers alike with Surface Book 3 and Surface Go 2

Exchange Rate

Always good to see vendors go for the old 1:1 exchange rate. $399 == £399? I don't think so.

We know what you want to write: Google injects more AI into G Suite

C'mon Microsoft

This is your big chance to bring us a cloud enabled version of Clippy. This time with AI.

Three UK goes TITSUP*: Down and out for 10 hours and counting

Gah

One presumes turning it off and on again has not alleviated the problem.

Three customer having a quiet day on the work calls front ;-)

Tesco parking app hauled offline after exposing 10s of millions of Automatic Number Plate Recognition images

Missed Headline Opportunity?

"There is no data, there is only Vizuul"

Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

Re: A product of his time

Just glad I'm not the only one that feels this way. It's the Pareto Principle in action again, 80% of the horse shit these days is espoused by 20% of the people.

Jeff Bezos feels a tap on the shoulder. Ahem, Mr Amazon, care to explain how Capital One's AWS S3 buckets got hacked?

Another grandstanding politician

I've not much time for Bezos but even less for politicians trying to make headlines. For starters, if S3 buckets are the attack vector then firewalls have sod all to do with it, S3 buckets are internet facing by design. Secondly, the instructions are clear on good practice - private by default (which new ones are now anyway) and don't embed secret keys in human readable code.

The other aspect to this story is that from what I can gather, it was an inside job anyway. So regardless of whose computer it was, if you have the keys to the kingdom, you can do what you like.

Microsoft unzips Zipline, lets world+dog have a go with cloudy storage compression tech

Re: Pied?

Damn, beat me to it.

Is that rain or tears of frustration on your face? Google Cloud bursts, Console and Dataflow washed away for hours

Re: Curious...

Probably because there aren't that many folks on Google Cloud. If it was AWS or Azure, the lynch mob would be out already.

Fujitsu pitched stalker-y AI that can read your social media posts as solution to Irish border, apparently

They'll use a fleet of refurbished ED-209s, obviously.

Total Inability To Support User Phones: O2 fries, burning data for 32 million Brits

Lyca Customers

Time your networked moved off O2 and merged with Virgin Mobile. Then we can finally have a network called LycaVirgin.

Oracle: Go on, sign off on our exec pay packets. We've changed!

On premise? On the premise of what?

London tipped to lead European data market. Yes, despite Brexit!

Re: London Ahead?

Let's be honest, it's all about the cash. Even if the UK leaves without a "favourable" deal (whatever that means), if UK tax laws get even more lax to encourage big business, that will be the deciding factor. How big are my bonuses?

x86 marks the spot: Dell reports upswing, keeps mum on going public

Re: Okay, but the real issue

Or a class 5 full roaming vapour.

Microsoft Azure: It's getting hot in here, so shut down all your cores

Marketplace is shafted too

"The portal is having issues getting authentication tokens for Microsoft_Azure_Marketplace."

For the love of fuck.

Home Office opens AWS cash firehose a little wider with police IT deal

Nee Naw

Spelling, grammar and proper language use police here...

"from a traditional on-premise data centre to Amazon Web Services".

On the premise of what?

Using Microsoft's Hybrid MDM? Er, not for much longer

Kudos

Well done in shoe horning in a RoboCop cultural reference.

Now someone call a goddamn paramedic!