Posts by theblackhand 915 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2009
IBM Software, sensing an easy way of culling staff, has mandated a swift return to the office for staff globally, telling those living within a 50 mile (80km) radius of a Big Blue office to be at their desks at least three days a week.
IBM also called on the government to also large corporations to allow the use of guns in their HR practices to cull the weak, infirm or those they just considered too expensive.
The race is still on for IBM and Oracle - which will be the first to give up on in-house cloud and go with one of Azure/AWS/Google?
While I'm sure they would prefer to go with an alternative, I'm not sure their government customers would be too happy...
"After 10 tests, there is only 1 in 1024 chance of humans doing all of them correctly, while bots will get them every time."
I think you maybe onto something.
My only concern is that 1 in 1024 is too low and increasing it to 20 tests makes the chances of it being a bot
This would obviously show a huge increase in popularity for the tests (based on the numbers of tests completed...), and adding an audio component that detects frustration based on muttered swearing could provide an additional level of checking in the future...
Harmonizing EU and US data laws? 1998 called, admires your optimism and thinks it might just have a way around this mess....
25 years later and 4 workarounds that have been dismissed by European courts (correctly - it's difficult to dispute their arguments) as unsatisfactory, here we are with neither party prepared or likely to move and yet somehow, multinational business must go on.
I'm ignoring the UK because the best they can do in this is choose a side.
Find an emulator....
Digging up old hardware starts with a "bargain", is briefly interrupted by some failed hardware, encouraged by buying a replacement card for a small fortune before entering the world of resoldering and buying dead cards and motherboards in the hope that you can find that elusive working component.
If the game you were hoping to play was "1990s hardware technician" then you're in luck, for other games you have emulators to get to the really fun task of configuration settings to try and make them them work properly...
Having worked in IT long enough to see multiple generations of OS/applications, it always surprises me when people on El Reg suggest teaching/training/changing peoples habits as the low cost option.
In large companies, a large portion of the group will adapt with or without training but a statistically significant portion (lets say 20% based on the 80:20 rule) are resistant to change even after multiple training sessions or require workarounds (i.e. upper management where PA's manage the majority of their communication).
Applying that to the UK driving population of ~40 million (or ~32 million if you reduce it to drivers using vehicles at least weekly) that is a sizeable group to change without significant cost/effort (i.e. retesting every 10 years would likely cost drivers £200m/year assuming a similar cost to obtaining a license and the cost of individuals time versus alternative activities being around ~£50/renewal) and while I have no doubt there would be some benefits to this around better driver behaviour, studies of post-license driver education from multiple countries have shown very little benefit in terms of accident reduction.
The reality is that there have been significant improvements in vehicle safety and road engineering over the last 10 years in the UK (21% reduction between 2009 and 2019 or 24% reduction between 2011 and 2021 but COVID impacted the 2011-2021 figures) even with ~2% annual usage growth over those periods
This presumes "someone else's cloud" is a worse option than the most prevalent existing option of "someone else's data centres"
The results of ~10 years of security reviews and assessments designed (subjectively...they were designed by the contractors that later failed the assessments) to demonstrate how insecure cloud computing was.
Note that the DoD cloud solutions are not generally accessible and require authorised connectivity following an assessment of your own premises security implementation.
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/us-defense-contractors/
I would suggest your comparison to tobacco advertising is flawed.
WHO estimates the removal of advertising and marketing resulted in a 7% decline in tobacco consumption in European countries where the bans were in-place and resulted in significantly lower numbers of new smokers.
From numbers released by tobacco companies, the marketing and advertising budgets were still being spent but on initiatives to help sellers versus advertising targeting consumers (i.e. smoking areas/smoking "gardens" in pubs and bars).
And the bans paved the way for tougher anti-smoking legislation as opinion wasn't being swayed by consumer focussed advertising.
Unfortunately, almost none of the issues with cyber security overlap with tobacco - cheap (relative to cost of manufacturing), poorly supported IoT/similar low cost devices (versus hugely profitable tobacco where even with huge taxes on products, tobacco manufacturers made billions) means vendors have even more reason to disappear while offering no support. And a "replace rather than fix" policy would eventually come into conflict with other EU policies around environmental issues.
My suspicion is that the "€180-290 billion saved" figure won't come from manufacturers if end users (companies rather than individuals - per incident cost for individuals likely don't pay for support or carry out maintenance for a variety of reasons from stability to system validation to poor practice (amongst others).
The "market" approach seems to be cyber insurance but it's immature at present based on spiralling costs and how it is implemented/paid out. I suspect it will arrive at a workable solution long before the manufacturer regulation approach without making products unviable in the EU
(That's not meant as a general "regulation" vs "free market" opinion, just a criticism of attempting to regulate an area that is poorly understood and I'm sure regulations will become a part of this in coming decades as viable paths appear)
Depends if you go Church of Satan or the Satanic Temple.
Satanic Temple is the more mainstream option and tend to go with the follow tenet for their vaccination policy:
"One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason."
The Church of Satan is much smaller and their policy on vaccination is very much down to individual choice but don't cause harm to others unless you are prepared to be destroyed by them so arguably that does support vaccination...
For anti-vax you a probably looking for the evangelical nationalists but they all paint Satan as the bad guy while they do what ever they want. Without any acknowledgement of the irony...
"... than poorly heated Legionnaires' disease coffee made from a warm tap."
How can you get Legionnaires' from a tap that's been broken since 2017?
And if you're fast enough to get to it in the few seconds between the maintenance people "fixing" it and it breaking again, I suspect what ever gave you superhuman speed likely also gave you an improved immune system.
Having supported Adobe/Coral products on Windows and Mac's in the 90's, the differences were night and day in terms of what you could produce.
Windows was fine as long as you didn't run into memory problems (i.e.you weren't doing anything large) and didn't require clip art or fonts. And even support for things like lartge capacity removable storage (i.e. Zip drives) was significantly more reliable on Mac's. And if you wanted to get material printed externally, the printing bureau was probably using a Mac so guess option didn't require IT support.
Over time those differences disappeared as Windows hardware overtook the PowerPC platforms and by the time I next had to deal with mixed Windows/Mac environments it was 2007 and the differences between the platforms were largely down to user familiarity with an OS rather than genuine differences - it was not uncommon to see high end Windows servers doing the heavy lifting with a mixture of Mac's/Windows boxes scattered through studios depending on user choice. That presented other issues, but they weren't unsolvable.
Consistently the worst may give the impression that is unchanging (particularly if you used competitors and just wished it would do X "that" way - you could never accuse Notes of being just another clone...) there were changes.
Honest - maybe even some that were positive. Oh...those were bugs. Ignore me.
Here's Mr Gates key statement about planting trees:
“It has obvious appeal for those of us who love trees, but it opens up a very complicated subject ... its effect on climate change appears to be overblown.”
30 million trees is able to capture the CO2 produced by 100,000 "average" people on this planet.
The UN believes that global population growth over the next 10 years will be 1.2 billion people. So 360 bn additional trees to offset population growth before we start looking into an overall reduction.
For the UK's part, the Tories are proposing an estimated 50 million trees a year or 0.5bn over 10 years for a population rise of 3.5 million in the same period. Approximately half the amount required.
Realistically, the UK would need a population decline of 3.5 million and planting 50 million trees a year to have a real effect. Or just the population decline...the trees are a rounding error even if they look pretty.
"If those vaccinated can still become carriers of the virus then the risk of the long gap before the booster jab is that it may make it more likely for vaccine-resistant mutations to develop."
While this is possible, the question is how do you deal with a limited supply of vaccine? Do you dose only the people you have two doses for or do you give lower levels of coverage to the largest group possible and hope that supplies increase to allow you to reduce the gap between doses?
Ethics/fairness suggest providing the greatest coverage is more important than "what if" risks givel the 40%+ mortality rates in the over 80s. Particularly when the "ideal" situation isn't possible.
As an approximation to the UK rollout (i.e. ignoring slow starts/acceleration as doses increase) of 2m doses a week, the "second dose within 12 weeks" delivers 65% coverage of the 13m target population within 7 weeks and 2nd doses within 8 weeks for a completion in 14 weeks. The "ideal" situation delivers 65% coverage of this same population within 14 weeks and completion in 16 weeks. Combined with patient transport/vaccine storage issues/scaling up vaccine supply chains/contingency in the event of vaccine shortages, I'm not sure there is any real argument for an alternative to the current method.
"The scientists' role is to provide the best estimates of numbers on the basis of knowledge available at the current time. Ditto the economists. "
The problem is that for most experts in any chosen field, there will be those with alternative views.
If we take Coronavirus, there have been scientists saying we aren't locking down fast enough based on very little evidence (that may later prove to be correct) and scientists that are saying we should lock down gradually as they want overwhelming evidence that it is the right thing to do.
While the tendency has been to blame the Government/SAGE, the role of the media where the are choosing multiple options and then pointing at the one that is viewed as most correct is easy.
I'm not trying to give the government a free pass - I think they have clearly made mistakes all through the handling of this crisis. Where I am a little more lenient is in distinguishing between being presented with evidence, letting departments/minsters discuss it and producing a resulting action. Historically this would have taken weeks or months but is being done in days or sometimes even hours.
Saying things has always been easier than doing them, particularly when many layers of bureaucracy is involved. And that is backed up by countries with devolved power doing better than those with centralised power.
And baby-eating Satan worshippers would seem to be an oxymoron based on rule #9
"5G...they can only install Antenna masts where there is Fibre... your essentially sharing a Fibre connection"
It doesn't have to be fibre, there are other backhaul options - microwave/radio are common and capable of significant speeds.
But yes, you will be sharing that backhaul connection. As you would with pretty much every Internet connectivity option.
"We looked at AMD embedded processors as a replacement for our Intel processors."
Is this with the latest designs or older units? AMD's embedded options have trailed the desktop/server CPU's in both core versions and process. 2020 embedded are the first ones that are likely to be competative with Intel (theres a similar story on the mobile side)
i.e.
2020 generation embedded: Zen 2 cores/5th gen GCN GPU/7 nm
2018 generation embedded: Zen+ cores/4th gen GCN GPU/14 nm
2015 generation embedded: Excavator cores/3rd gen GCN GPU/14 nm
Of those, it's only really the 2020 versions that are likely to be competative with Intel as they move to 7nm and start to outperform Intel 14nm+ or later chips.
And if you were testing against the 2015 generation chips, maybe AMD will give you a freebie 2020 version to make up for wasting your time.
I'm wondering about power as well - while the standard may support 4GB/s there is also a lower 3GB/s option versus SDXC maxing out at 1GB/s which is much higher than you would typically see on an SDXC card reader.
The interface appears to be rated at 1.8W vs current cards that are under 100 mW.
Intels q4 server CPU sales were off the charts - up around 49%
I know Nvidia contributed a chunk of that with their Geforce Now DC's, but hadn't hard which of the other big cloud providers took the rest.
AWS/Azure/Google had all been delaying spending waiting for new chips, any evidence that it was AWS that won?
"I well remember the RISC anxiety at Intel when I worked there 35 years ago."
And when Intel moved from pure x86 CISC to x86 CISC instructions decoded to µops to run on a RISC like architecture with the P6, what happened to that anxiety? Sure, Intel hedged it's bets with Itanium/VLIW but reality wasn't kind to that...
"the process that sees hordes of overpaid junior lawyers and accountants poring over every tiny detail of a business before going ahead with a merger or takeover."
In most accountancy or legal firms, overworked is more accurate than overpaid. The juniors do the donkey work (usually with significant amounts of travel and unpaid overtime), the senior managers are paid well to apply the whip to keep things going and the partners rake in the money and put the entertainment on expenses.
Oh...and the juniors are responsible for all mistakes.
"they can't _buy_ enough outsourcing capacity to catch up because it's all booked out."
To address outsourcing high performance chip designs to another fab - you will likely take 1-2 years to redesign a working CPU operating at >2GHz if you take a working design from one fab to another.
Intel/TSMC/Samsung all have significantly different processes - a working design for one fab does not instantly translate into a working design at another fab, and if you are dependent on a design that is outside of the conservative fab design rules, you risk low yields and poor performance. For examples, look at AMD/nVidia GPU's on identical TSMC processes where one card substantially under-performs or has low availability - typically the first GPU or largest GPU does not clock as highly as its rival because of design issues. A year later, we see a decent boost as the updated chip addresses the issue.
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