Posts by Doogie Howser MD

Amazon congratulates itself for AI code that mostly works

Gartner

Never really understood why Gartner holds such sway. C-Level folks seem to treat the MQ as some sort of mandatory box ticking exercise that is part of any new procurement.

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

Madness by committee

I'm far from a feminist but in this day and age, this stunt was just ridiculous. As has been mentioned in countless LinkedIn threads though, how did this decision pass through all the modern layers of committee review to be approved in the first place?

Hard to imagine they did this just for press. After all, they have John Wick jumping through time now to sell their Frankensoftware.

Microsoft decides it's done with Azure egress ransoms

Re: Wankery

Whilst I agree with your comment on them not really supporting customer choice (I mean, none of them do), in the interests of balance it's worth pointing out that dividends from stocks also play a large part in pension funds, so not just flash Wall St types but also butchers, bakers and candle stick makers. It's just the way the money circle works.

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

Be Brave

Speaking purely for myself, after all that woke Gemini nonsense from the other week I decided to ditch Google as much as possible and I decided to go with Brave, with it being based on Chromium. I have to say so far I've been very happy with my choice - everything just works and I'm loosening myself from Google's tentacles.

UK Cabinet Office hits pause on £9M Microsoft deal

So what did the taxpayer fund?

I probably didn't read the article properly but what did this failed project cost in the end then? I know there will always be commenters who think that some command line Linux and vi is good enough, but that's just not the reality. Instead I've often wondered why more public sector bodies don't band together and get better bulk licensing deals out of vendors? I remember back in the dim and distant past the NHS had one giant licensing agreement with MS that gave them a better discount than hundreds of piecemeal agreements negotiated locally and then the coalition government came along and decided that was a crap idea and scrapped it.

Regardless of your ideologies on software/vendors/etc, you'd think the best policy where taxpayers' money is involved is to get the best possible discount whilst getting the maximum level of coverage.

Ivanti devices hit by wave of exploits for latest security hole

Nice work PAN

Bit rich of Palo Alto to launch a promotion to get Ivanti users onto their platform when they have a problem with CVEs themselves. Rank behaviour.

Oracle database deal in Azure comes with a health warning from licensing experts

Typical Oracle

Nobody does license gouging quite as well as Big Red.

Civo CEO on free credits, egress fees, and hauling it all back on-prem

If you're willing to wait long enough, everything comes back into fashion eventually.

WeBroke WeWork, WePromise WeFix it: How subleasing giant hopes to survive bankruptcy

Make some goddamn noise!

Re the bootnote - that's peak Silicon Valley (the show) right there.

You've patched right? '340K+ Fortinet firewalls' wide open to critical security bug

You might not think of Fortinet as being "cheap" per se, but at the enterprise level they always win on price (I know this from experience). Problem is, you get what you pay for and the amount of fairly nasty CVEs seems to disproportionately affect Fortinet more than the others in this space and we always seem to be scrambling to play catch up. Buy cheap, buy twice.

Rackspace datacenter infrastructure took 12-hour nap in London, Sydney, Hong Kong

I wouldn't call Rackspace "real" cloud...

Modest Apple talks up these 'incredible' advances in iOS

Flat innovation curve

This article is timely for me as I took delivery of a new iPhone 14 yesterday to replace the 12 I had on my old contract. Needless to say it looks exactly the same (the same case and screen protector fits the 14!) and the software is the same. Innovation in mobile phones flat lined years ago and it's no great surprise that people are keeping hold of their handsets for longer now. I think I'll stick with the 14 longer than my current 2 year upgrade cycle, as long as I keep getting software updates and the handset holds a reasonable charge, the rest I don't care about.

There's nothing "amazing" or "incredible" about anything in this market, just rehashing the same old shit from years ago.

Google Cloud's watery Parisian outage enters third week, with no end in sight

Re: First rule of SRE: the minimum number is THREE

You're wasting your time with the people on here. It's usually a binary argument of cloud == expensive and bad. The discussion is far more nuanced and broader than that, but it's all commentards seem to care about these days, so this website keeps pumping out the content to wind people up, maintain engagement and sell ads.

The inevitable deluge of down votes will serve to illustrate my point!

US changes rules on tax credits for electric cars to cover American-made only

Funny that lefties criticised Trump for taking a protectionist stand and then Biden arrives and turns the dial to 11 and suddenly it's a good thing!

Meta's Zuckerberg paid $27M in 'other' compensation for 2022

Can he be paid in Metaverse tokens and not real cash? Paying yourself a $1 salary and trousering cash from other sources is a canny way to avoid taxes if you can do it.

Fujitsu bags £142M UK government work since Horizon probe announced

More often than not I think the status quo is kept because Fujitsu are too big to fail. Yeah, it would be great if the work was given out to a "proper" UK company with a specific focus on these types of projects, but they often lack the financial wherewithal to weather any kind of legal storms. Sad but true.

I'm not defending any current politicians, but if Wikipedia can be relied upon for facts, the genesis of this project was in 1996, so many politicians of all stripes have had the opportunity to bask in the warm glow of a stuffed brown envelope or two along the way.

Tiny Brit tech firms win spots on £1.84B public sector contract. Kidding, it's the usual suspects

As bad as these folks are, it doesn't help that the project steer on the public sector side is usually as wonky as a shopping trolley. At least in my experience, anyway.

Royal Mail wins worst April Fools' joke 2023

Not a great look I agree, but I fail to see why this appears on what should be a tech site. No tech angle at all as far as I can see. I can get this type of article from dozens of other places, I come here to get a breather from it on occasion. Too much to ask?

AWS delivers a – rather late – major release of its homebrew Linux distribution

Amazon seem as rapid keeping their Linux distros up to date as they do keeping Lambda runtimes updated with newer versions (see recent Corey Quinn threads for further details). Makes you wonder if there is too much bureaucracy in the place to enable it to run properly.

Forget ChatGPT, the most overhyped security tool is technology itself, Wiz warns

Re: "in the end, it's not really about the tools you buy"

In the interests of factual accuracy, Raaz is later in the article determined to be a woman. No pronouns are explicitly listed, so we have to go with that fact.

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

If only

HMRC was quite as on the ball getting appropriate taxes from the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, Starbucks et al.

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Re: Depends on your co-workers

"..which is frankly their loss"

Nice ego.

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.