Posts by Gordon 10

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

A counter-counter factual is that NASA spent $196Bn on the Shuttle program, and they've only spent.... drum roll please....$14Bn on SpaceX projects (including Falcon launches).

Apple goes all in on AI acceleration with M5 MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pros

TBF even the Intel Macs obsolesced very slowly. I've just upgraded from a 2011 iMac with Opencore Legacy patcher to an M4 MBA simply because the HD was getting chattery and I couldn't be arsed to dismantle it.

Even my work 2017 Intel MBP lasted until last year, and I could have squeeze another year or so out of it if I hadnt have thrown my toys out of the pram at work to get an M class.

Re: Illussion

What you talking about Willis?

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

And? The exam question was user apps deployment not MacOS App development. Completely different use case.

If you need Xcode for work then you register your work address on the app store. The app store doesn't require an icloud address.

That’s just not true. All our corporate apps come from the Intune store.

It’s really won’t. You have no idea what you are spouting off about. Most of the iOS stuff is just an overlay.

We’re a mixed environment about 150 Mac’s to 8000 Windows machines. Mac users are mainly execs, IT or creatives.

Mac users have Admin rights and are meant to be self supporting.

I’m a Mac user, sit on the self help forum and our rollout has definitely gone too far - there’s probably 10 users who are responsible for 90% of the issues who should have their Macs forcibly removed. TBF 50% of the issues are with Adobe cCeative Cloud which appears to be Malware masquerading as software.

Just switched painlessly from Jampf to Intune so common-er admin console with the Windows fleet.

Our replacement policy is 4 years for Windows and 7 for Macs. Probably should be 6 for Mac.

The only bug I have is that we have an Mbp only policy and 50% of the Mac base only need a 50% cheaper MBA, so we are cutting off our nose cost wise.

SpaceX Dragon huffs, puffs... and fizzles out as NASA aborts ISS boost

SpaceX?

Much as I hate MElon, surely rapid turnaround of space maintence vehicles is a job for SpaceX? I would have thought the long pole in the tent is design off the coupling or pushing attachment.

UK Lords take aim at Ofcom's 'child-protection' upgrades to Online Safety Act

Re: House of Lords

THIS. Finally someone gets it. The HoL is a bit shit. But the alternatives - another useless encrustration of elected arseholes is infinitely worse.

The solution to a political problem is very rarely more politicians.

Proportionaliity is the problem

This is all very well but Ofcom are going after the wrong targets - and will continue to do so because its easier than going after the real targets - the Hyperscale SoMe owners.

So we mum and dad scale hobby sites having to close down due to cost of implementation and those that damage kids an incalculable amount on daily basis go about their business as usual.

Its a joke - as are Ofcom on this issue.

Anthropic to pay at least $1.5 billion to authors whose work it knowingly pirated

Re: Designed never to be spent

Did you even read the article? Anthropic have already set the bar at $3k per book, in part persumably becuase it fucks over Meta and OpenAI. $3k will be the lower limit.

Re: "a distinguished VP analyst"

I've seen him speak a couple of times. He's actually one of the more articular less bullshitty ones. Imagine a tech nerdy version of James Earl Jones or Wendlell Pierce (James Greer in the Jack Ryan series)

UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost

Re: Using an LLM effectively requires a new set of skills

And what % percentage of basic office users can write a macro or create a power automate script or a PowerBI report? All similar tasks similar in complexity to basic prompt engineering.

You’re just proving LLMs aren’t consumer grade.

Re: This gells

Thanks John. You’re correctly pointed out what the AC missed which is tech costs aren’t measured at the same scale as corporate pay, An E3 license is £19 so have to copilot on each one increases your office license cost by 150%.

Your example is a good one, another one. Copilot costs $360 a year, or about 1/2 the replacement cost of a corporate latptop. How many Co’s do we know that can/would spare the cash to replace their entire suite of laptops every two years? 7 mins per day is probably the kind of benefit you’d get from a decrufted new laptop.

This gells

With what Gartner Research will tell you off the record if you have a contract with them.

Copilot saves about 15mins per day at best - and is not worth paying essentially for 2 office seats per user. As a $5 add on it’s reasonable. At the current RRP of $30 it’s mostly unsellable. At even higher prices for MS to actually break even on the costs - it’s laughable.

Also because it’s only 15mins most users take the time to make another coffee or have a chat with a colleague, hence no material productivity gains,

Also based on the trial I’ve run. Free Copilot Chaf has about 80% of the gains of the paid version. All you lose is the clippy functionality in the Office suite which is marginal. The ENTRA/MS graph intergration is good and where the other ~20% comes from.

UK patches air defense with 6 extra Land Ceptor missile launchers

Re: Russia, Russia, Russia

And yet real actual military analysts rate Russia as having the joint second strongest military in the world with China.

France is 6th and the UK 5th.

https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php

Re: Russia, Russia, Russia

Attack is not the same as invade you numpty.

If an attack by Russia on a NATO country triggers article 5 then Russia will immediately consider all of NATO including the UK fair game.

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Re: "adult content providers"

But not lots of skin and dangly bits. No siree! Not in Hollywood.

Re: "adult content providers"

You can’t discuss what if’s as absolutes like you’re trying to do. That exactly the same argument the UK Govt is using in the opposite direction. What if kids see extreme porn?

If I thought the OSA was an effective way of making kids safe (I don’t but let’s pretend), of course that trumps the real but small risk of your nasty habits leaking online.

Both are weak arguments. The argument should only ever be about how effective the law could be for its intended goal with statistical modelling to show it’s got a chance of achieving those goals AND a similar analysis of the downsides.

Chinese funding backs sale of British microLED specialist

Re: Plessey........

In shocked and stunned it was still a thing, Thought Plessy had died years back.

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

There's not one Government that wont. They are all at it. Some just pretend more than others.

Re: Tell us something new

You are breaching GDPR in a wholly irrelevant way though. This elephant has been in the room since GDPR was formed and its just one example. Look at Safe Harbour.

If the benefit from data interchange is big enough - even the EU turns a blind eye to it.

So whilst you are breaching GDPR or Client Confidentiality - no one will point it out because no-one else in the room is wearing kecks either.

Re: There have been so many things

There is no guarantee of sovereighty with any cloud company, Yankee or otherwise. Microsoft are just the case in point.

You either go on-prem - and even thats vunerable to a sufficiently motivated state actor - or you risk assess it.

There are no absolutes in this game - ever. Lets stop pretending there are.

I'm gonna play devils advocate here. Mark Boost is being a little disengenuous, There is no way if you are asked to guarantee something under oath, that you will answer yes unless you personally are aware its watertight and there are clearly ways that it may not be.

That doesnt mean that MS (or anyone else) couldnt engineer a situation where its very very very difficult for it to happen in practise.

For instance MS US and MS France are 2 seperate companies, with 2 legally seperate sets of employees and infrastructure. So you engineer it so neither set of empoyees has **any** data access to the other set of infra. Lets also say France has a law saying export of French data for a Cloud Act request is a crime. The US Ceo has to obey US law and says give me data on pain of jail time. The French CEO has to obey french law and says non - J'irai en prison.

Result : Legal Stalemate.

Of course whether MS has the will to implement this is a another story. Just like its theoretically possible for the Data grab to happen - its also theoretically possible to prevent it - leaving edge cases like the NSA hacking it out of France etc.

The reality is that bad lawyers and politicians play the absolutes game. Good Lawyers and Techies play the risk game. What is the likelyhood Uncle Sam will do a slurp and what are the consequences if they do do.

Lets face it - if you want to protect your data you hide it in a cupboard in the basement at the bottom of a long stair behind a door that says beware of the Leopard, and you patch your leopard against Zero days.

Mike Lynch estate owes HPE $943M over Autonomy fallout

Re: Legal teams are rubbing their hands

Yes. The auditors bascially said we havent done enough due diligence.

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

Re: the UK might end up as a US territory,

If you wish to lump Starmer and Farage together you can at least point out they have very different agenda's. Farage is a genuine suck up/axis of Fascists. Starmer's into damage limitation.

Atlassian migrated 4 million Postgres databases to shrink AWS bill

Re: batlassian crazy

Based on my observations they are throwing more AI shit against the wall and hoping some sticks than most - so thats where the savings have been pissed up the wall.

*No walls were actually harmed in the making of this tortuous metaphore.

Apple accuses former engineer of taking Vision Pro secrets to Snap

Re: Something Odd about Snaps response to this story

WRONG

Tell me you dont know about US employment law without.....

All but 2 or 3 US states are "termination without cause" states. Which means employees are out the door with 2 weeks notice as long as its not overt descrimination.

Something Odd about Snaps response to this story

Given US employment is so shockingly biased towards the employer and he's been accuses of exfiltrating files directly related to his job, it seems bizarre that Snap hasnt just fired him already.

Which kinda either suggests he's too important to fire OR that there is a kernel of truth in Apple's allegations and Snap are complicit.

Interesting times!

Also - why would any employer want any Tech employee who is this shit at covering his tracks?

Meta calls €200M EU fine over pay-or-consent ad model 'unlawful'

Stop mapping your delusions onto random stories.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Thanks for the additional detail thats not being covered by the national media.

As I suspected all along (I missed the first article) - LHR dont DR test their power supply and they dont have a resilient infrastructure, the rest is moot.

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

Re: US has it's finger on the Kill Switch.

Its an essentially meaningless tactical politcal decision that appeases the Orange One and costs the UK nothing. The delivery wont happen until near the end of the decade when we'll know whether the Orange One is "elected" Dictator for Life of not.

Its militarily strategy flawed, though hardly a big deal if they can be used for partial F35B training conversion, so tactically its a wash.

It is however politically tactically astute whilst we wait out the Orange One, who which like it or not Starmer seems pretty good at managing.

Thats meaningless when we rely on the yanks for maintenance of the trident missile that delivers them, and remind me, but havent the last 2 tests been failures? Not to mention the UK SSBN's have a really poor servicability record too?

On your last point RAF Lakenheath - actually a USAF base for the F35A, F22 and multiple other B61 certified US jets - is apparently a designated store for the next generation of the B61 (currently being upgraded with finest US pork barrels) and is 40mi away from Marham.

One supposes the Brit F35A's will stage out of Lakenheath if needed.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Good Old Days

In the good old days of a globally avaiable 24/7 "known unstable" codebase we used to goto the pub on friday lunch time followed by release and checkout on Friday afternoon.

It was not unkown for a release to cause an entire system crash.....odd that

New GitHub Copilot limits push AI users to pricier tiers

Re: Perfect

You do get this stuff is opt-in right? Its virtually impossible to get Dev's to use it if they dont want to.

Snowflake and Databricks bank PostgreSQL acquisitions to bring transactions onto their platforms

The Gartner write up is bollocks

OLTP and Analytics DB's are a false seperation for all but the biggest workloads.

90% of Postgres databases will fit into Databricks / Snowflake with very little problem because the cloud DB's have the horsepower to brute force the performance.

Its solely inertia and cost of change that persists Postgres at this point. The DB's are probably 2nd tier apps that are chugging along for years without change.

Stargate to land its first offshore datacenters in the United Arab Emirates

Ahhh. So its only important to onshore American jobs if you haven't bribed the Orange one. Got it.

Any one else think the AI bubble bursting is going to make the Dot Com bubble look like a blip?

Actors' union complains about Epic Games cloning Darth Vader

Re: A sign of times to come

Methinks you either dont know what the definition of Rentier is or that you are deliberately using it out of context to be a bellend. My betting is on the latter.

M&S warns of £300M dent in profits from cyberattack

Re: A £300million reduction in profits

Exactly. Its gobsmacking that their recovery is taking so long. One can only assume their systems must have been falling to pieces and DR and BCP was non-existence.

Meta's still violating GDPR rules with latest plan to train AI on EU user data, says noyb

Re: Envelopes

Again you display your total ignorance of GDPR compliance programs and your Wiki quotes are irrelevant. For full disclosure I run a GDPR compliance program.

The whole point of a compliance program is NOT to show you are 100% compliant - we all know that is impossible - its to show you have a reasonably robust set of processes carried out against a risk framework.

It doesnt matter if the ICO or another regulator disagrees with your risk framework - the mere fact it exists and you are doing it in a methodical way shows you were trying to achieve compliance with good intent. WHICH IS ALL THAT ULTIMATELY MATTERS from a regulatory process. 99% of Compliance works in the same way.

Bear in GDPR as written is almost totally un-usable on a practical basis without an extensive set of assumptions and practical examples of how to implement. Its written by Lawyers with almost zero concerns for whether its practical to implement, particularly with respect to how technology handles data. This is where the cost of compliance is generally felt - at least during the early stages of legislation where there hasnt been much industry concensus - people have to make some risk based assumptions plus get extensive guidance from the individual regulators.

Add in the fact that GDPR is just a broadbrush (relatively speaking) set of principles set at the EU level. Each EU country (including the UK) has its own national level legislation that enacts those principles AND that is what you have to comply with. Mutli-nationals generally pick one EU countries legislation as their lodestone to comply with, again because thats a very practical and defensible position to take. Some choose country level compliance - thats generally because they are Mahousive, Risk Advserse, have looser corporate structures or a combo of the 3.

There are generally 2 ways to implement GDPR -

1 lip service and weasel words - worked examples - Meta, Data Brokers, Ad Tech, Gambling Tech.

2 take an honest punt at a complex topic.

Most SME sized companies choose 2. They'll tag whomever doesnt move fast enough as a DPO who'll try to make decent fist of it based on whatever small amount of time they are able to devote to it. How that happens is generally based on 3 dimensions.

1. A Data Classification Policy - most decent sized B2B orgs will have one of these already for other purposes (PCI, SOC2 etc)

2. An Asset (application) Catalog - detailing what data an Asset handles.

3. A Processing Purpose Catalog - These can be thought of as Business processes badly skewed by Privacy lawyers.

1. Is where Personal Data comes in. The simplest catalogs classify personal data by example not by definition - into 2 buckets that correspond Lower risk personal data and higher risk personal data. For simplicity most GDPR programs align these to PII (Personally Identifying Information) and SPI (Sensitive Personal Information). Most country regulators will have guiance on this bucketing process many industries have agreed common practises and classifications.

For this reason its material false to claim that PII is an American invention. Its a globally recognised shorthand for saying lower risk personal data.

Now fuck off back to ChatGPT and Wikipedia.

Re: Envelopes

This is fundamentally wrong. You cant say GDPR is nothing to do with PII then go on to say its a subset of the data that GDPR is concerned with - thats a contradiction.

The reality is that that PII and its more sensitive cousin SPI are typically used as Personal Data risk classifiers in most GDPR Compliance programs.

Something you obviously have zero experience of.

Re: Envelopes

Tell me you dont understand GDPR without telling me you dont understand GDPR.

Everything you type is slanted BS.

Post Office finally throttles delayed in-house EPOS project

£400M for a glorified shop and bank EPOS combo?

Not to trivialise the problem but for £400m you could put a Postie on the moon. Thats a ludicrious price for a known problem and solution set.

And yet you have absolutely zero evidence that that is the case. Get in the Bin.

Intuitive Machines blames dim lighting and dodgy data for second lunar faceplant

Re: Plan B.

Ah yes. Now work out a design that achieves that with minimal mass gain and functionality loss, and no complexity gain.

Twonk.

Re: It wasn't always like this...

And your points are totally irrelevant... leaving aside whether they have a decent design the purpose of this exercise is to produce "Model-T" landers from in a vaguely commodity fashion. Not the hand crafted Bentleys you are describing. Its actioning different sides of the Faster, Cheaper, Better triangle.

You are also making the totally flawed assumption that progress is linear - it never it.

(Im neither for or against these current efforts - just pointing out the massive logical fallacies in your arguments.)

AMD is Ryzen to the SMB occasion with a bundle of baby Epycs

Re: Brand dilution

You arent the droid they are selling to.

Enterprises rate reliablity far higher than benchmark scores. Benchmarks rarely drive enterprise sales - reliablity stats and warrantee's do. EPYC means lower failure rates and better post-sales support and thats all that matters.

To misquote General Brady.

Amateurs study spec sheets.

Professionals study reliability & return stats.

Or to put in software terms - if you arent prioritising your NFR's you're probably doing it wrong.

Tech suppliers asked to support single electronic health record across England

Re: Patient access

You've misunderstood the use case. As have the people switching the system off at night. *Some* use cases not requiring a immediate response, or indeed any response at all should be 24hr, with a review queue if necessary for when the receptionist can be arsed.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

Re: How do you do, fellow kids?

Not necessarily. Its pretty easy to code only for sent mails not including any previous body text. That covers 90% of email volume with just the edge case of quoting a previous mail to detail with. Its definately not beyond Apple to come up with a solution for this.