Posts by deadlockvictim

Hi, Pakistan? You do know anyone can edit Wikipedia, right? You don't have to ask

Re: Must try harder

True and their definition of 'smut' is quite wide-reaching.

Just the word 'woman' into any browser on safe-mode and you will already have 'smut'.

My guess is that the Pakistani authorities are authoritarian in nature and expect other bodies to be equally so.

And with authoritarian bodies you have to project strength and demand.

And so, the very idea that they could summon 100 underlings to go and actually make the changes themselves is outside of their ken.

Who would be weak enough to let anyone to do that?

Probably the same people who let their womenfolk outdoors without the permission of their father, brother or husband.

Intel cuts some workers’ pay to fund its future

Article» All employees below Principal Engineer … will get a 5 percent cut, 10 percent cuts will be instituted for VPs, and the executive leadership team will take a 15 percent cut, with CEO Pat Gelsinger taking a 25 percent cut.

Well done Intel for such a progressive move when the need to cut back spending is there.

It is better than wantonly laying off 10,000 jobs. That being sad, the article did say that there would be layoffs.

Microsoft Office 365 Cloud has a secret lining

Office362

I wonder if the TLAs get the same unscheduled downtime as the rest of us and what effect that might have on miscreants deciding to wait until then to act?

The wages of sin aren't that great if you're a developer choosing the dark side

Darkside-adjacent

Or you could get reasonably good money by working at a bank or an insurance company where you are probably contributing to more anti-social behaviour by furthering the institution's goals.

And it's respectable.

DARPA wants to upgrade the way we make chips. How exactly will that work?

Well

I've always like fission chips.

They should do these again.

I'll get my coat...

Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation

Re: Show us the stats

Really?

By whom?

Would you supply some evidence to back this up please?

And what exactly do you mean by 'business endpoint'? MacBook Pros? Some new class of cloudy offering? Are Apple planning to take the IoT world by storm with a cutdown version of MacOS devices everywhere?

Re: Show us the stats

I'm more surprised that Mac OS usage is above 10%.

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Important cloudy metric: hours of unavailability (aka downtime)

Before you even consider moving cloudwards, you need to know for many hours the service will be unavailable per year and broken down into planned & planned downtime as well as which geographical region, amongst other dimensions.

It's usually written into SLAs and the figure offered by the cloudy offerers will have to be higher than what you currently get with your on-premises hardware and their support staff.

Bill shock? The red ink of web services doesn’t come out of the blue

Cost of Personnel

El Reg» he calculated that the AWS monthly compute component of the giant invoice was £63k a month. Buying equivalent hardware from Dell worked out at just $1.3k a month.

This is just hardware though and the costs of the sysadmins, DBAs, site-reliability engineers were not added in.

To take a convenient yearly salary of $96K, that translates to $8K per month, if the company needed 8 more people (on that salary) to maintain on-prem servers, they would be at roughly the same figure as the AWS bill.

This also has to be taken into consideration. I haven't even mentioned electricity, spare parts, replacement drives, training courses and other additional costs that go into maintaining on-premises servers.

Personally, I prefer the on-premises model on the grounds that more people have more varied jobs and companies have more control over their data, I just felt this needed pointing out.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Hexidecimalization

I agree, the Imperial System would have an awful lot to recommend it if everything was evenly divisible by 12 and only 12.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Re: What a load of cobblers

That's right: cakes don't kill people, people kill people.

Oddly enough, Eddie Izzard springs to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZVjKlBCvhg

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Basil Brush laugh & boom boom

Title says it all really.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtxbM7-jAD0

vanilla

Please stop using 'vanilla' to mean 'plain' or 'ordinary'.

Real vanilla is expensive and really nice.

There is no need to use a metaphor when perfectly clear adjectives exist in English, namely 'plain' or 'ordinary'.

Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code

Re: It's just a tool

PST» Lots of wicked articles are written using MS Word. Terrorists probably use Excel databases.

This sounds like a perfectly valid reason to ban Word & Excel. I don't see what the problem is.

Microsoft’s Nadella: Tech is in for a rough two years

automatically-generated code

I see the SQL code generated by Entity Framework and if this is anything to go developers can code faster but the quality of their code is falling off a cliff.

Out of interest, I wonder what percent of the forthcoming layoffs at Microsoft will be developers and what percentage of the reasons for their layoffs will be AI doing their jobs for them?

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

Re: "job for life" died at the end of the 1980s, Amazon is no different!

Ronald Reagan, this is your legacy.

This is what you have left America: all-powerful corporations & their executives and workers who can be disposed of at a whim.

You really were the antithesis to FDR.

Some engineers are being paid between $250k and $1m, says salary survey

Re: Yet Another BS "survey"...

My takeaway from the article is that the typical engineer will start in or around the average industrial wage and rises from there.

It's not explicitly mentioned there, I simply extrapolated backwards from those deemed to be in demand who get the surgeon-type salaries.

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Re: Yeah, smart appliances are DUMB.

Instead no new vehicles with ICEs will be produced after a certain point and the price of petrol will be sky high on account of its relative scarcity.

That certain point might be 2050 but I do think that it will happen with the next two generations.

Just be sure that your children/grandchildren have a large reserves of fuel onhand for your Mustang.

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

Adam Smith's point is valid, but not in this case.

If the butcher was in collusion with the hospital and knowingly sold me meat that would cause me to go to the hospital, I would refuse to buy the butcher's meat. And so it is with Alexa & friends.

As it is, these devices are wolves in sheep's clothing. Their primary purpose to gain information on you and to sell you more stuff and not the apparent one of making your life that little bit more convenient.

I would happily buy an Alexa-type device if it could be used locally (that is, without an Internet connection) with a local server and if it didn't phone home all of the time.

Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025

Re: Decade or two too early

So, do you reckon this is akin to the Newton from Apple in the 1990s?

It was a nice idea but realistically unimplementable in 1990s' hardware (although Palm didn't do a bad job some years later).

It certainly wasn't the iPhone that would follow 12 years' later.

Re: Gartner

A fellow by the name of Ball» "I'm led to believe there's a target audience for adult entertainment, perhaps"

When I read that, I mentally added, ', while strapping himself up in his personal sex dungeon.'

MacOS9.app: A tour de force of emulation and integration

Macintosh Garden

And if any of ye are looking for old software for the Macintosh, the Macintosh Garden is a good place to start.

States label TikTok 'a malicious and menacing threat'

Re: Disingenuous

Point taken. I was a bit too quick in my rush to post.

Disingenuous

Ah yes, American politicians being disingenuous again.

If you are genuinely concerned about the effects of social media on the youth, then ban all of them (and not just the big Chinese one), or, better still, only allow adults to have smartphones.

This would be no bad thing.

If you are genuinely concerned about Chinese apps spying on the taste of American youth, then ban all Chinese apps and all purchases from China. We can't have Chinese corporations learning all about the purchasing habits of US citizens.

I'm not sure what it would achieve, other than indicating to China what you think of them.

Chinese corporations are, by no means, saints but, then again, neither are the corporations from the First World.

Are ye doing it just to get at the youth, most of whom, when they vote, they vote for a party that is different to yours?

Or is this ban really just petty posturing and point-scoring?

Gunfire at electrical grid kills power for 45,000 in North Carolina

Re: probably wasn't an act of terrorism

They were using the wrong weapons.

These groups should be outfitted with water cannons so that they can do the job properly.

Elon Musk picks fight with Apple for slashing advertising spend on Twitter

Be very quiet, I'm hunting rabbit...

For the younger members of the audience, who may be unaware of what an Elmer Fudd is, look here. It is sadly not completely though.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Autocracy

This is what it looks like.

China declares victory over teenage video game addiction

The War on Drugs

I'm not sure that the black community in the States would agree that ye did nothing with the War on Drugs.

It has been remarkably successful at getting young black men locked up. And we all know that there is nothing more evil or socially destructive than smoking weed (except, of course, Hunter Biden's Laptop™).

SQL Server license prices rise ten percent as version 2022 debuts

It's always about Azure

With Microsoft, it's always about Azure.

SQL Server is still too attractive to a great many companies and they aren't choosing the rental model that is Azure that Microsoft would like.

Companies don't swap databases lightly. There is a lot of knowledge in coders, DBAs, business analysts and the like and the move to another RDBMS involves a lot of work, possibly poorer performing databases.

In our case, senior management chose SQL Server for us. It will take a lot of internal pressure and price hikes for them to tell us to start the years' long move to PostgreSQL and I don't see it coming soon.

So, in short, Microsoft are raising prices because they can.

Use SQL Server if you must, otherwise Azure is waiting for you.

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

Re: Monopoly Money

I'm not so sure.

If Twitter goes belly-up (as it seems to be), his credibility as a leader and entrepreneur will be in tatters.

Can you imagine any billionaire, bank or hedge-fund lending him money for a future investment?

Hi, please lend me $10B and I'll have it squandered in less than a week on account of arrogant & reckless decison-making.

There will be no return on your investment.

Microsoft makes a game of Team building, with benefits

Nowadays

Again, Microsoft is thinking too small.

Elon Musk has shown us how to waste time at work — don't just waste your time (and money), lay waste to the company.

If you are going to waste time, do it in style.

Make the company unworkable.

Lay off half of the staff so that the other half can't get any work done.

Fire employees who point out exactly what you are doing.

Destroy what remaining morale there is in the company by telling them that they will have to burn themselves out for the sake of Elon and little more.

On a different note, companies should organise voluntary LAN game nights just outside office hours with decent games.

Killing your coworkers multiple times is very satisfying.

White dwarf study suggests planets are as old as their stars

Heavy elements

Article» So-called polluted white dwarfs contain lots of heavy elements – like magnesium, iron and calcium

Are calcium & magnesium heavy elements or is everything in space that isn't hydrogen heavy?

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Hardcore Salary

Will the salary be also hitting hardcore levels for those who choose to accept the offer?

Although I don't work for Twitter, I'll consider myself nonetheless fired from Twitter for even mentioning it.

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

AC» The dems are the cult.

Explain please. I am genuinely very interested to hear this.

Red Cross seeks digital equivalent of its emblems to mark some tech as off-limits in war

warning: Pedantry

The Swiss flag is square. It is one of two square flags that I am aware of (the other being that of Vatican City).

You had all the keys on the keyboard, how could ye get the flag of the Red Cross wrong?

Twitter employees sue over lack of 60-day layoff notice

Re: The situation in Ireland is perhaps more interesting

Proper social security? In Ireland? Are you serious?

Yes, you won't starve but I doubt anybody in Twitter who is renting will be able to pay rent on what they get on the dole. Hopefully they have money saved for this rainy day. Other lucky ones whose parents live in Dublin (or near by) can move back in with their parents while they are looking for a new job.

There has been a housing crisis in Ireland for the last 10 years and the majority of new apartments & homes built have been sold off to institutional investors, namely companies looking to milk the renting sector for all they can get.

Thankfully, there are other companies in Dublin and, with any luck, the majority of ex-Twitters will find a new job within the coming months.

I'm not a fan of Twitter but being fired/let go is not at all fun and having lived through it back at the beginning of the millennium, it's not something I'd like to live through again.

The world was promised 'cloud magic'. So much for that fairy tale

The Cloud is a fairy tale (just not for you)

Headline» The world was promised 'cloud magic'. So much for that fairy tale

On the contrary, haven't you seen the profits made by the cloud providers?

The Cloud is indeed a fairy tale for Amazon, Microsoft and friends.

The purpose of companies is not to be honest, think about their customers' best interests or even improve the world but to make money and this is exactly what the cloud providers have done.

UK facing electricity supply woes after nuclear power stations shut, MPs told

Re: Hmmm.

jonfr: Nuclear waste is safe and not a problem if handled correctly

Would you object or complain to your MP if it was decided to bury spent nuclear waste in your vicinity?

Re: Hmmm.

There's an increased cancer risk too.

People living in Dundalk — across the Irish Sea from Sellafield. as well as people living on the North Wales coastline — have known about this fro decades.

Here is an article from the Grauniad on the matter: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/1998/dec/31/nuclearpower.uknews

Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'

A modst proposal

Nanoraptor on Twitter has a modest proposal: https://twitter.com/NanoRaptor/status/1577409285805731840/photo/1

Her suggestions are great to consider, if somewhat mac-oriented. I could spend an evening going through her Twitter feed,

Shareholders slam Zuckerberg's 'terrifying' $100b+ Metaverse experiment

Bankruptcy

I'm all on for Mark Zuckerberg's grand experiment to bankrupt his companies.

The only thing is, what will replace them?

AWS buys 100+ diesel generators... and that's just for Irish datacenters

Wind power

I don't understand why the likes of Amazon & Facebook don't have their own massive turbines built off the west coast of Ireland.

God knows, Ireland is a windy place and while they won't be generating power all of the time, they will be most of time.

It's hardly as if these companies are short a few billion.

And while these have little to do with the diesel-powered generators they need as a data-centre-UPS but it would mean that they would be immune to the vagaries of price hikes and there would be a lower chance to put the diesel-powered generators into operation.

And it would make for good PR too.

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

Re: Th' rochand'ſ Saxọ̄̆nlī

Thanks for the extension but it's for a Google product, alas.

You have given me the choice between US English and Google.

I hate Google more so I'll stick with the US-icated site.

Basecamp decamps from cloud: 'Renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal'

Re: "Why does it always rain on renters, asks CTO?"

AC» Is it because they lied when they were seventeen?

Not to mention the fact that everybody said everything is alright.

Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365

Re: Survey missing option

The survey is missing the 'Meh' option.

AI recruitment software is 'automated pseudoscience', Cambridge study finds

Dear Personnel Department

If you are flooded with applications for a position and have neither the personpower nor the interest to go through them, don't bother with AI tools.

There is a simpler method that is fairer and as good as the AI tool: pick x applications randomly and invite them in for an interview.

It is quick, fair and cheap.

Of course, it also means that you aren't doing your job properly but when you use an AI tool, you aren't doing your job properly either.

Airline 'in talks' with Kyndryl after failed network card grounds flights

Korev» Why didn't the primary DC use the backup line?

Good question.

I will say that disaster recovery is not easy, or rather, it is a non-trivial task enough to plan it out and testing it is hard and very expensive. These systems needs to be tested often & regularly.

Why didn't they check that all of the moving parts were operational.

everything that can be made redundant should be made redundant. Why wasn't the network card redundant?

This failure for Aer Lingus demonstrates why redundancy is so important.

Google burns few hours of profit to disappear location privacy lawsuit

Re: "Google also admits no wrongdoing"

This is one way of taxing companies.

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

Re: Dame Sue Ion, former chair of the UK Nuclear Innovation Research Advisory Board

I wonder if she is a radical?

Remote work wipes $453b off office real estate

Economics

Does this mean that there will be more reasonably priced offices for startups and small businesses in places where the rent is just too goddamn high (to quote teh journalist Matt Yglesias)?

Is there any chance, then, that rents will fall for office space or does economics only work in one direction?