Posts by theblackhand

Trump derails Chinese H20 GPU sales, forcing Nvidia to eat $5.5B this quarter

Re: Ouch

I don't believe this is a tariff issue - the parts are produced in Taiwan and likely assembled somewhere in Asia so likely miss the tariffs.

The issue is export restrictions - as nVidia is a US company and H20-based products are currently export restricted, they can't be sold to China.

At a minimum, export licenses are required - there was a rumour that nVidia would be exempted from this following the Mar A Lago dinner. Looks like $1m doesn't buy as much influence as you need to sell $5.5bn of AI chips...

It's International Datacenter Day for those who colocate, er, celebrate

I'm sceptical

Reading through this article I sensed that the author isn't truly celebrating this important and meaningful day.

If you can't celebrate Datacenter Day, what is the point?

Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid

Re: "If you're serious about protecting your privacy from your smartphone"...

There seems to be some sort of collective amnesia about how common call monitoring was before mobile phones where call tracking was less necessary because people were either at home or at work so they could take calls (some sarcasm but a big chunk of truth).

Privacy briefly peaked between 1999-2004 with the introduction of TLS 1.0 before hardware caught up and alternative monitoring/decryption systems were available.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Re: Could you describe the ruckus, sir?

The one where the front fell off?

Ref for your Tuesday viewing pleasure

https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

Intel slows its roll on $28B Ohio fab expansion, pushing production to 2030s

Re: Pop...

Intel's bubble popped in 2018 when 10nm wasn't commercially viable (and it would still take a few more attempts before Intel was prepared to concede that fact) and TSMC was providing ARM and AMD 7nm with a viable next generation strategy.

The sound you are hearing isn't a pop, it's inertia - the sound of the gears continuing to turn but lacking any driving force.

There is still time to restart the engine but can anyone find the key?

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

Re: Shaking

$2bn farming subsidy? More like almost $8bn for soybean subsidies and $12bn in subsidies overall to cover loss of earnings due to Chinese agricultural tariffs (ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_farmer_bailouts)

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

"Delays and share loss" is just a nice way of saying that Intel continues to be unable to make a competitive CPU product since moving on from it's 14nm line launched in Q4 2014.

That's 5 generations of bleeding edge fabs that have failed to deliver competitive products.

Sure, Intel managed to add makeup and new names to 14nm to hide the fab failures for a few generations but the moneys going to run out for gen-next.

Fear of the unknown keeps Broadcom's VMware herd captive. Don't be cowed

They spent $69 billion to acquire VMware - saying they aren't in this to recoup that investment would be unlikely.

They aren't in this to develop VMware into a better product - they are in it to reduce operational costs as much as possible and bleed customers dry.

Broadcom have taken the risk that customers might realize how badly they will be pillaged for ongoing support that they will instantly jump ship. I would suggest current customer behavior is to try and minimize support costs rather than jumping to a new vendor. If it takes the majority of customers 3+ years to realize things won't get better, Broadcom likely make money on their investments.

So ~<15% loss of market share per year means Broadcoms strategy is working.

Time-frames/market share numbers are pulled out of my butt but based on Broadcom getting around $16bn annual revenue from VMware and successfully reducing operational costs from $6bn to $2-3bn/year for the next 5 years.

Re: Established vs new requirements

Software isn't perfect - it has taken years to get VMware environments rock solid.

Moving to an alternative platform will result in a few years of hardware and software tweaks to get back to the current state and in the meantime there will be a few hung VMs and other surprise outages.

And the current infrastructure tasklist to address back logs and other business initiatives isn't getting smaller. And I won't even mention the technical debt and security piles.

Will Broadcom really screw us if we wait one more year? Yes. Yes they will. They will screw your balls in a vice and squeeze until every last penny in your infrastructure budget is spent. And then they'll squeeze some more because it's fun and sometimes it causes money from other budgets to appear in their grubby little hands.

So the point is move and move fast because Broadcom have 69 billion reasons to take your money.

It's probably worth noting that Broadcoms VMware support and maintenance divisions have been pared back to the bone so even if you negotiate a few more years of licensing it's likely to deliver that bumpy, "surprise outages, new hypervisor feel anyway....

Oracle finance system at Europe's largest city council still falls short 2.5 years later

Re: Still not "safe and compliant"

Auditing was enabled in Oracle in August 2023 after an "oversight" - if I was wagering money on it I would suggest it was done to reduce hardware or storage requirements as the fix required additional hardware purchases.

For multi-year contracts that were entered prior to auditing being enabled, the council is unsure if details were entered correctly as there's no auditing - as pre-August 2023 contracts age out of the system, they will eventually get to the point where they have either have full audit data for spending or have reviewed any contracts that weren't audited to get to the point where they are confident that the figures being produced are correct.

That's easy to answer - pay for both of them!

As they are still using the SAP system at a cost of around £5.1m/year. Said system has been heavily customized over its 25 year life.

As SAP was viewed as ruinously expensive, the plan had been to go with a vanilla Oracle install. The wider business rejected the vanilla option resulting in years of additional work and avoiding making tough decisions.

I believe the Oracle solution does cost less than the SAP solution and was due for delivery in 2021, but who knows when it will be fit for purpose having failed two years audits.

First Foxconn, now Microsoft: Wisconsin town dissed by big tech

Re: See elsewhere for details.

How about a 250MW solar project? https://nationalgridrenewables.com/press-release/national-grid-renewables-signs-power-purchase-agreement-with-microsoft/

Re: Did MS have their arm twisted?

Unlikely - there are no Azure GovCloud locations in Wisconsin and the Wisconsin facility was billed as an AI hub (https://news.microsoft.com/2024/05/08/microsoft-announces-3-3-billion-investment-in-wisconsin-to-spur-artificial-intelligence-innovation-and-economic-growth/)

The likely reason is that the phase-1 data centre has raised issues about power/cooling for future generations of hardware. I.e. MS signed a deal in Oct 2024 to fund a 250MW solar project but I'm unsure when that will be operational and that maybe a contingency for getting the second phase operational (assuming phase 1 is 2 x 40MW DCs and phase 2 is a further 4 x ~40-60MW facilities). Note I've made a lot of assumptions based on limited available information around buildings, total property sizes and "typical" Azure DC buildouts.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Re: Variable Names : Case Sensitivity

Avoid spelling mistakes by using single letter variable names.

26 variables is more than I could ever conceivably need.

Developer pockets $2M in savings from going cloud-free

'You would think that cloud computing vendors would benefit massively from economies of scale"

They do - that's why AWS and Microsoft Azure make around $26bn and $35bn respectively per quarter and growing.

Why isn't it cheaper? Because they are still building their monopolies to the point where they are the only game in town for low latency, high bandwidth compute services

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

Re: Choices

"Talented and capable people may well choose not to work in an organisation run by arseholes"

People who have been through these culls know the signs and will be looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Many of the talented people they want to keep won't be told that they are safe until it's too late because senior management are worried that the wrong people will find out about the cull...

Microsoft crafts Rust hypervisor to power Azure workloads

Re: Are They Out To Eat Broadcomm's Lunch?

I think it is unlikely to ever ship - it's attempting to provide a solution for Azure VMs to easily move between different hardware platforms or different hardware features without the need to build feature specific VMs (i.e. RISC-V vs ARM vs x86). There are significantly challenges to doing that efficiently so it may remain an experiment.

There is the possibility that some of the features mate it into HyperV or that HyperV is rebranded into a common brand with HyperV and OpenVMM, but this is unlikely to be targeted at on-premise solutions.

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

To whom it my concern

Dear IBM

You are correct that AI can replace part of your workforce. The mistake you are making is the section of the workforce you are targeting.

The employees that you are currently looking to replace with AI actually provide your customers with useful work.

Those that are suggesting replacing workers with AI would be perfect candidates for being replaced by AI as they are higher up the foodchain, so the savings will be greater, and they have likely built a career on being incompetent, aka the IBM way.

Lots of love

A customer and former employee

Major ISP bungles settings, causing Microsoft 365, Azure outage

Re: DNS

Except when it's not.

Often this is an important exception.

Intel: Our balance sheet is a smoking ruin, but we think our new chips work

Re: The chip shop

The real damage to Intel over the last 10 years has been their failure to deliver new processes which has made investors jittery about investing even more money in the next generation of fabs

Maybe that's what you are classifying as reputation but this is likely the last attempt at staying a leading edge semiconductor company unless the US government choose to assist with the next future fab refresh which I think is likely for another generation unless TSMC commit to US operations.

While you may scoff at that, spending $20bn on a pair of fabs that might not break even makes people risk adverse and there isba long history of semiconductor manufacturers not being able to finance the next round of upgrades and becoming a niche manufacturer or going out of business.

French internet cables cut in act of sabotage that caused outages across country

Re: F.T.A.

Did he lack the second brain cell necessary to understand his job description?

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Re: Slow electrons

QoS decides what traffic you are prepared to drop (if you don't have the bandwidth) or queue (if you do have the bandwidth) to allow better service for other applications

QoS doesn't alter the unloaded latency of a link which is primarily based on distance for links over long distances or routing hops for short distances - it potentially helps with loaded latency on a link (i.e. priority queuing for voice) but that that depends on how easily the traffic can be differentiated and how well applications handle dropped packets.

VMware revenue plunges $600M, but Broadcom assures investors growth plan is on track

Re: Strong growth, huge cost cuts

"And yet $600 million less revenue.

I'd say that's a sign . . ."

And quarterly costs down $700m ($2.3bn to $1.6bn) and expected to reach $1.3bn by end of 2024.

Which puts net profit at between $400m and $1bn (assuming and addition $100m/quarter) if the revenue loss remains similar.

Only 30% of large customers have signed a new or interim deal so those revenue figures may look even better by the end of 2024.

I'm not saying this is good for VMware customers - if anything, taking $4bn out of annual costs should show exactly what future VMware sales and support has to offer if you are on the fence about moving to a competitor...

Early MySQL engineer questions whether Oracle is unintentionally killing off the open source database

Re: Questions?

That's harsh - many corporations continue to push products that can't be monetised.

Like IBM with Lotus Notes post-2005...

Broadcom’s VMware strategy looks ever more shaky - and less relevant

Re: What strategy

While it might annoy customers, saying that it's not a viable strategy ignores the history of IT - all the big companies have been doing this for years.

Or have I missed where HP, Cisco, IBM, Dell, SAP, Oracle etc acquired other companies and improved the products rather than just ramped up prices while reducing operational costs by reducing features?

And yes, I'm old and grumpy and my glass might have been half full if it wasn't for evaporation...

It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

Don't take this as condoning Broadcoms practices, but I suspect that their pricing is such that they make 3-4x the revenue off VMware for the next 2-3 years as the reluctant migrators wait for Broadcoms to see sense and then finally move over the next 1-2 years.

At which point Broadcoms have made a massive profit and can sell VMware onto someone who wants to rebuild it.

Lords of May-hem: Seven signs it is Oracle's year end

Re: "there's nothing illegal in its approach"

There's questionable legality about putting the first Oracle account managers head on a spike outside HQ, having spare spikes around it and a note saying there's more on back order.

I say "questionable" because most publican's will provide an alibi if you're a regular and the police have got better things to do once they remember the annual squeeze on overtime to pay Oracles increased licence costs.

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: newer != better

The real beauty of this plan is that the Venn diagram for the two groups is probably a single circle.

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

Re:Cloud OpEx versus onprem CapEx

The story hints that there has been significant underinvestment in the past and that there is a skills gap for cloud services in the current IT teams.

That translates into CapEx being difficult to obtain but once it is obtained it will likely be eked out over an extended operational lifetime.

And on the cloud side, a lack of skills often results in a failure to update and decommission older systems which results in spiralling OpEx costs without ever addressing the funding gaps in skills and legacy systems.

So I'm not confident that we would see any medium to long term benefit or difference for either approach or a hybrid of the two if the underlying issues are not addressed

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Re: Loctite

Rather than certify a new reputation with the FAA, Boeing choose to add some software that made the old reputation look OK so they could sell more of the same old crap.

What could possibly go wrong? Other than the software malfunctioning and causing board members heads to become so tightly wedged where the sun don't shine that their heads cannot safely be removed by even the most skillful medical team.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Yearly tasks....

A long time ago? What are you talking about?

The 1990s was only 10 or so years ago....

Red Hat greases migration to RHEL for CentOS 7 holdouts

Following significant customer demand, "Why did you do this?" will be added but you will need to enter credit card details before you can see the answer after agreeing to IBM's terms and conditions.

The answer will be "you should have just paid for the RHEL licenses, it would have been cheaper..."

HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems

In Windows, if you go to the Microsoft Store and search for Sprinkler where will be an app with what looks like the poo emoji.

Install that, wait 10 minutes and every festering stain on humanity will be installed...

Note: on OEM systems, the manufacturers poo sprinkler may be pre-installed and you maybe unable to notice any additional applications following the use of the generic windows poo sprinkler.

Vanishing power feeds, UPS batteries, failover fails... Cloudflare explains that two-day outage

Would testing have helped here?

My reading of the power situation was that IF the data centre had used it's generators for powering just the data centre, the earth issue likely would not have happened.

Only the data centre knew about the deal to sell excess power back to the grid and as that was unknown to Cloudflare it is very unlikely that it would have been a test condition.

My take on the lesson here is that if you need things to be done reliably at cloud scale, you either have to be able to quickly scale horizontally across facilities (challenging as your interconnects either become the bottleneck on scalability or the cost of additional facilities becomes a significant factor in scaling) or you run the data centres yourself to allow these risks to be managed inline with your company's goals.

Or you try to be transparent and hope the explanations are sufficient to satisfy customers and you keep enough systems up to get by.

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 6.6 after running out of excuses for further work

The thing that always amazes me about Linux topics is the crossover between "I use Linux because of how flexible and powerful" it is and those that dislike any new features even if they plan not to use them.

Improved SMB performance means faster NAS/filer performance from appliances and various storage distributions for home and business users and I guess we will see if your security fears materialise based on these features.

If you don't use it, switch it off...

UK tribunal agrees with Clearview AI – Brit data regulator has no jurisdiction

France have fined Clearview and Clearview have not paid as France has no jurisdiction to impose the fine until Clearview either has an entity within French territory or a French entity starts working with them.

I would argue this is the difference between how the French and English feel laws should be interpreted rather than a failing of data protection laws when there is no jurisdiction.

Volkswagen stuck in neutral after 'IT disruption'

Re: Rumours...

While it wouldn't be the first subscription type service to cause issues, maybe this is the kick that hardware manufacturers need to understand why it's such a terrible model for anything other than their revenue streams...

Or maybe my beers just half full. Or maybe I forgot to renew the subscription for the other half.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

A small correction...

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.

IBM Cloud to 'uplift' prices by up to 29 percent

Re: IBM Cloud to 'uplift' prices by up to 29 percent

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...

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

Re: Blame AI

Are ElReg commentards attempting to take over from the Onion in the "accurately predicting the future via sarcasm" game?

How many months before Watson appears at a comedy festival to demonstrate IBMs advanced in AI?

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Re: Task failed successfully.

"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...

Euro monopoly cops to probe Microsoft for slipping Teams into Office

Re: Edge

There might be a reason for not mentioning Edge:

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Or are you referring to the monopoly it has on being used to install Google Chrome?

UK's proposed alt.GDPR will turn Britain into a 'test lab' for data harvesting

Re: Yay - yet more laws

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.

BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI

I think what you mean is that a long-term solution is better than a workaround that will just need fixed properly later...

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

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...

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

Re: "adding ramp metering."

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

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"

Are you suggesting that purchasing a firewall was not enough?

It's siting safely in a locked room in the box it came in.

And even I'm unsure if this is sarcasm or just reality in some organisations.

Microsoft Office 365 Cloud has a secret lining

Re: Is that not an oxymoron ...

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/

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

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)

Linus Torvalds to kernel devs: Grow up and stop pulling all-nighters just before deadline

Ban hammer?

What you need is the BOFHs patented clue hammer.

Repeated application either imparts the required clue or permanently fixes the problem.

Tried and tested on hardware. Tempted but untested on westward.