Posts by Alistair

If you're cautious about using ML and bots at work, that's not a bad idea

LLM/ML processes

I'm no screaming genius on any front, but I am well enough versed in a few areas to feel the need to go all BOMBASTIC BOB on this tendency to refer to LLM/ML processes as AI.

There is no intelligence to these things, they are probability indices and control parameters that are fed insane amounts of data and due to sheer volume, on occasion approach humanistic interaction. Three issues; 1) There is no *reasoning* built in to the process, it is more like a statistical model than reasoning. 2) It is abundantly clear that there is nothing approaching *logic*, once again, its statistics. 3) The source data, frequently being grabbed in mass volume from numerous sites with both professional and generic internet troll input contains a fairly high relative volume of Garbage which, clearly with ChatGPT 3.5, over sufficient time leads to the GIGO issues we're starting to see more and more often from these computer processes.

Am I the only one here who has a *serious* problem calling *any* of these thing Artificial Intelligence?

Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

They also know which is which. The AI knows nothing.

Doc;

I would have upvoted this 10 million times. However:

They also know which is which. The LLM knows nothing. TFTFY

US-Canada water org confirms 'cybersecurity incident' after ransomware crew threatens leak

Uuuhm. Lithuania was part of the Russian republic, and after WWII was part of the Soviet, so the comment that they don't touch ex russian states isn't 100% correct.

I'll concede that the Lithuanian populace in general were never in agreement with being part of the Soviet......

Water rights between US and Canada are really not a huge issue at the general populace level, although there are Native Rights groups that contest a lot of the water rights stuff.

I'm guessing that the invaders went "Oh LOOK, this stuff labelled "CONFIDENTIAL" that means it will cause controversy and conflict!!!! YAY!!!"

When much of that is confidential simply because of the nature of the negotiations.

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

Re: They put a man on the moon ...

@ Dizzy:

My grandfather had a steamer trunk with wheels on one end. Back in ......almost 112 years ago.

Re: Remember the Honda 50?

These things do need better regulation. Saw an escooter at 11.15pm in dark and rain on main road with no lights this week.

One?

There is a 'test marketing' run of two different E-scooter rental operations in our city just outside the GTA. The rental scooters have lighting (and at least the FORWARD light is quite visible) and helmets attached. Small herds of the scooters are left sitting on corners and near bus stops etc. Those I don't have a lot of issues with since they do have lighting, but there are a dozen or so E-scooter vendors selling to the locals. Vast majority have *some* form of lighting on them, but in most cases its far far too pale or low level to allow a driver of 3 tons of rolling death to be able to *see* said scooter at night, especially when the riders are typically wearing all black hoodies. I've damn near had a heart attack a couple of times when 4 or 5 of these things come flying around a corner (slow down and check traffic before turning into it?? Who does that??) in front of me at night.

Salesforce flipflops from 'you're fired' to 'you're hired' in six short months

soooo

We done fired all the 'spensive folks what was costing us too much after they'd been here for too long. Now we have to hire a bunch of schoolkids at minimum wage to do all that work.

We've seen where this goes.

Be prepared for your salesforce cloud installs to suffer from certificate expiry, data encryption and exfiltration and backup failure in the near future.

Oh, and don't expect the hacktivist exvestors to offer anything in the way of compensation.

Scientists trace tiny moonquakes to Apollo 17 lander – left over from 1972

Re: Freight train

*cough* American, Canadian or Association.

Then you've lots to play on.

Snowflake's Instacart protestations hint at challenges for poster child of the data cloud

Data Lakehouse?

So the data is out at the lakehouse, enjoying a cold one on the dock while fishing up a ...... profitfish?

<hides under the desk>

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Lesseee here.

ADL and other anti hate group(s) claim Xitter is getting worse since his muskiness took over, and because of that the Adwertwisers have run away in droves.

Hmmm

So, his muskiness decides to sue the anti hate groups to recoup funds that have vanished since he took over.

If, in fact, the claims by the anti hate groups are correct and substantiated in court, his muskiness looses. If it's shown that the Adwertwisers ran away for some other reason(s), his muskiness looses.

If by some bizarre twist of reality (fate) his muskiness *wins* any of the relevant court cases, would he be inclined to hire Marjorie Taylor Greene as his advertising executive?

Attackers accessed UK military data through high-security fencing firm's Windows 7 rig

Cyber essential ring fencing basics.

The last thing I am is a hyper specialist. What I am is a damn good all rounder in the IT space.

I've posted a few times before about ring fencing specialist windows (7/NT/etc) installs to talk to ridiculously expensive hardware that does a specialist job, for which the vendor either no longer exists, or has no interest in updating the software for that set of hardware. (CAT and Xray kit mostly, but also a pair of 60 ton sheet steel presses with awesome capabilities, for which the *next* generation with updated software, running on newer windows has *cough* a) monthly baseline fees and b) for each of the awesome capabilities, monthly additional fees).

I'll note someone suggested Wine, above, and for *some* hardware connections its just fine, audio tends to be okay, printer port type connections are fine, but serial and USB connections tend (with this type of hardware) to be proprietary and Wine *really* doesn't like stuff like that. I *have* gotten parallel port connections with proprietary protocols working with Wine, but that was back when I was contributing. I don't know how far it got taken.

I'm a *very* firm believer in stuffing these instances into VM's and using the host firewalling to manage the connections directly for the guest. In my experience, it has worked the best, as VLAN management in windows 7 didn't exist. Yes, that can be done at the switch, but there are morons *who swap cables around* -- I'd hope there was mac address control on those ports as well, but I *really* haven't seen *that* much in the instances where I've done this, it seems to be an afterthought brought on by my ranting at the local tech. Hardware passthrough in KVM tends to work with somewhat more reliability than with Wine in my *personal* experience.

The *host* system can be backed up using standard processes, so long as we snapshot the VM beforehand, and get all the image files. With appropriate documentation, a system that was in use in this way, recently suffered complete meltdown (there was a serious fire, took out much of the plastic, wood, and non-hardened steel in the zone) where, when the rebuild completed on the press, and the software was restored from backup on new hardware, things picked up from where they left off. Documentation is *absolutely* required in these cases, careful, complete, and concise.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Re: I remember well...

Thing was, she'd break out in a rash on the underside of her forearms

Used those damn sterile wipes on the arms of her chair ever day did she?

30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros

Re: POLL anyone?

FWIW AC, Fedora has dnf-plugin-system-upgrade.

Essentially, make sure your system is fully updated to (now), run the upgrade download (pulls all update packages and dependencies, check for retired/replaced packages and run a pretest) then do dnf system-upgrade reboot.

I've a rather complex install on my desktop and on a couple of those runs I've had to completely remove one or two self built packages, run the upgrade, then rebuild and reinstall, but thats my fault for doing slightly weird testing on bleeding edge crap.

On three other systems I have hands on that *don't* to weird stuff, the last ?? 6 system upgrades have been fire and forget.

The only gotcha, is that /var needs up to 8Gb of space free, depending.

Most distant observed star is blue – and it isn't alone

Far away, and blue?

Is it charging at us? Is it the Light At The End Of The Tunnel? Should we be moving our galaxy out of the way soon?

Canada's Telus to shed 6K workers as profits plunge 61%

One thing here to note

CRTC changed the rules on primary carriers and what they charge *non* associated MVNO's and associated MVNO's. Essentially, Rogers, Telus, Bell (the three primaries) have had from 4 to 7 associated or subsidiary MVNO's in their folds. Because of the rules changes, all three majors are working to fold the subscribers to their subsidiary MVNOs into their primary line of business. (Thus the reported subscriber increase in Telus' quarterly). Annnd, since they're *all* running behind the schedule they've had to cut the charges to non-associated MVNOs along the way. Wont last long tho I'm sure.

Read lips? Siri wants to feel them, according to fresh Apple patent

And then there's us old pharts

Here I was figuring that they we gonna market those horrid tasting wax lips for kids, but with digestible motion sensors embedded in the wax, and have you pair the "lips" when you put them on to say horrid things to your companions.

Considering what we used to say to one another with those things about, I'm guessing Apple would end up cancelled in a hell of a hurry.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Finding the back door.

Ages and ages ago I spent most of a summer at the Science Centre. (25 cent bus ride, 50 cents to get in the SC, and 1.50 for a hotdog and drink for lunch, it was cheap daycare basically) and found the tictactoe on the mainframe had a back door, of sorts, that got you into Colossal Cave. Got tons of weird looks from the others there, but the attendant had no complaints about it, apparently thats why it was there. Could read and play on the terminal, but the overhead view wasn't very readable.

Sysadmins are being left out of AI implementation

"corporate strategists" = technically illiterate MBAs ?

AKA Unicorns, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Kraken?

NASA awards $150 million to prototype tech for humans on the Moon, and above it

Re: no-light lunar landing technology

There's a Pink Floyd album, you need to be high as a m$#$%king kite, crank the tunes and the answer will be revealed.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

Slackware is still in my list of tools.

Along with a fairly long list of BSD and Linux distros.

Where I hit slackware first? Probably in 94 or 95. Mostly as a "what is this thing" experiement while I was getting comfortable with Netware and other courses at the time.

Where did I use it most? In 97, moving in with the GF, and setting up an internet connection for us, on Dial up. Slackware on an older clunky box did the dial up , and four BNC network cards. Modem setup in slackware was *stupid* simple and worked first time out, routing setup was easy peasy, and I met iptables for the first time. My machine and the GF's online at the same time on dialup blew several friends minds, and thus there were 6 more slackware users added to the list. Fourth card got stuck in an also older machine, for the (at the time) two littles (post 99 I'm fairly sure, since a 1 year old and 2 year old don't computer very well).

Eventually the apartment building got wired up by (Large canadian telecoms provider) with an exclusive agreement on cable. At the time I was working for them so got all sorts of cheap on that front. Replaced the BNC ethernet with 100Mb cable, and *still* had slack as the router. Although at that point the slack box had been upgraded and had both GF's and my websites hosted on board.

It runs in a vm now, with the DNS filters for the network, and manages the firewall rules on the DSL router and the wifi router. For my uses its still an awesome minimalist, solid as a rock OS.

For folks asking me about "this linux thing" if they've done windows basically all their lives, I point them at Mint, if they've done unix of any sort along the way, I point them at Slackware for the basics.

RHEL drama, ChromeOS and more ... Our vultures speak freely about the latest in Linux

But where's the tea?

Now that you guys got that kettle boiling regularly?

I *love* the kettles you've done so far. Great idea, and so far I've found myself wanting to jump into the conversations with my own views. Kinda annoying I don't have a "Raise Hand" button on the video.

On this one, there is the "do distros matter" question, and there are both yes and no points, and given that, I think The Reg will have a huge division amongst the commentariate.

Keep up the great chats.

(P.S., Orange Pekoe, long steep, dab of milk, and one sugar, please and thanks)

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

Re: Entra - from the prefix 'entero-'?

Soooo in the future when MS Azure has serious problems with login failures they can honestly say that the cloud $h@7 the bed?

Re: "If you’re building something new, you name a lot of its internals after the whole thing."

...... Middle level executive completely and utterly confused when told that there was no *need* to compare PROD_A from company to PROD_b from company..... simply could not wrap their MBA around the idea that the company had just changed the name.

I think I've hit that wall at least 8 times in my career in IT. And in *every* single case it was an recently graduated MBA at Director or higher who had been imported to the business. {i.e. 0 past telecoms experience}

We will find you and we will sue you, Twitter tells 4 mystery alleged data-scrapers

Twitscraping

Fun part will be when he finds out is being scraped by Federal Government Agencies. Just *watch* the fireworks!

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

Re: "We're often imitated, but the Twitter community can never be duplicated."

We're often imitated, but the Twitter community can never be duplicated bought.

I'ma bet that if you offered the entirety of the twitteratti $2.50/month for a year to switch to {alternate platform of the moment} you'd obtain at least 60% of them. Trust me, the vast majority of them are purchasable.

Re: a text messaging platform my kid could write in an afternoon

Per a *fairly* large consultancy group W/R/T Oracle's financial platform circa 2006/7

............ "Each table will need it's own spindle, and an index spindle, this provides the responsiveness required to make the platform stable ........"

We quietly pointed out that tables + indexes on the relevant DB's summed up to 56,000+ .........

Gotta wonder where some of these "Highly Experienced Professional Consultants" acquired the *cough* experience.

Re: Whoever wins ...

Someone said something they don't like on twitter? They saddle up their trusty battle keyboard and ride off to war, often not to be seen for hours.

Snarky comments are exchanged, Google is searched for things to back up their argument / disprove the other's, friends are recruited to join the fray, until they emerge hours later, tired, dehydrated, hungry and slightly crosseyed, claiming victory because the opponent finally got bored and went to bed/ blocked them etc.

They seem to think that it matters, that they are somehow making a difference, and they just don't seem to understand that the rest of us don't give that gnat's fart about who said what on twitter.

Ummmm.

Mods? Can we get this comment about 100,000 upvotes please?

SpaceX says, sure, Starship blew up but you can forget about the rest of that lawsuit

Re: Space X

a wildlife preserve does not itself preclude successful, beneficial co-existence with a launch site

Oddly I know that. The differences here are scale. The wildlife refuge in Florida is *upstream* water flow wise, rather than downstream as in Boca Chica. This is a rather critical issue. Further, scale matters, Kennedy is much larger than Boca Chica and the wildlife refuge around it is enormous, while (Okay, haven't actually done the numbers) at Boca Chica the sizes don't seem to have the same ratio.

The previous use as a petroleum site also raised some flags, however that was addressed as SpaceX cleaning it up since they'd have so much *cough* firepower it would be a safety issue to not do so.

It may be that it is not currently planned or projected to be the primary launch site, but it certainly, from the business model of SpaceX is the only primary launch site that makes any sense at all. The possibility of shipping those rockets around exists I suppose and with the access to the gulf, water-borne shipping would be the rational way to go I suppose, but that is time and infra costs.

Hmm, Starship from Guiana? Possible?

ArianeSpace might actually consider it I suppose.

Space X

The site was a bit of a question mark when announced, as much of the content of the lawsuit was raised as issues at the time. TBH, I am rather surprised that there was eventual agreement amongst (collection of US Federal agencies with relevant oversite) and SpaceX that the site was usable for launching rockets without causing environmental chaos.

That said, there is a DAMNED good reason why that site was chosen from a "Lets fling things into orbit" side of things. I'm fairly certain that its somewhat better than any of the NASA launch sites for accessing multiple orbital paths, (W->E, E->W, N->S) helping to reduce CtO (cost to orbit) for the launches.

I'll note that I do have somewhat biased input as a relative is a member of one of the animal rescue entities that supports those turtles, and I suspect that the launches just might cause more issues there than Gwen or any of the executive would like to (currently) admit. All that said, I'm still an advocate for getting Starship into service. I'm just thinking that there might be sufficient political fallout from the Boca Chica site as a primary launch site for Starship that MIGHT cause SpaceX some relatively high cost political flak.

Meta's data-hungry Threads skips over EU but lands in Britain

(Loose) Threads application release

Well, we all know what happens when you pull on that loose thread at the seam of your sweater.

a) considering timelines to launch, I give the white hats 48 hours before they dump Zucks entire account from threads. Black hats get 18 hours.

b) Zuck has the lesson of Twitter in hand, it had x users for y years and made -$$$$ losses all along. They are like hell risking loosing one red cent on this new app.

c) Meta has what? 97% of its revenue from selling advertising? You expect that leopard to change spots in 6 weeks?

I avoid social media like the plague for a ton of different reasons although I do have several SM accounts, only two can in any way be associated to me, and *NONE* of the apps get permissions to read in everything on the device. Oddly, VM's come in handy for weird things like that.

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

Re: Only ever used the middle button on CDE desktop on Solaris!

Once you've used a mouse with bark/forward buttons,

You use your mouse to intimidate folks by barking at them? I need this mouse button.

Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email

Excuse me while I giggle

On the RH sources thread I think I made a comment that is slightly relevant......

RHEL has only one target

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

Re: "never agree to anything that comes from an unsolicited phone call."

I've taken to firing IPV6 link local IPs at them. Monster confusion when they can connect .....

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

Not to be the cynic in the room, but

Lets be blunt. Redhat has no animosity to the downstream freebie distro's that publish its work. Sure the commentary said "they bring us no value". Everyone in the room knows darned well that that line is from the pile out back of the barn. Redhat has one, and only one, target with this move.

Oracle has OEL, directly from the fat purple hats work, and Oracle has spent *years* and *millions* of dollars doing its damnedest to get everyone on the planet to pay them for .......... no, not the DB, JAVA. Because java is everywhere. Redhat simply wants to force Oracle into a long term, multi-million dollar agreement to pay for the RHEL sources. Much like Oracle would do with java if there weren't so many forks available. Either that or make Oracle do the work themselves, meaning investment in bodies and infrastructure to do the work.

There are a couple of other far lesser known distros that have indeed used the RHEL sources and charged downstream for support, but those are highly specialized and will quickly make an appropriate agreement with RH. They aren't billion dollar companies, but specific to certain fields, and again, they do add work, specialized to those fields.

California man jailed after manure-to-methane scheme revealed as bull

Re: On a more serious note ......

our local sewage plant has, for several decades, been generating enough electricity to run the plant using methane they produce from fermenting shit.

Ahhhhhhhhh, now we know where Annheiser-busch gets their beer.......

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: The Software Freedom Conservancy's response

The Software Freedom Conservancy's response

Met once, long time ago. Still one of the smartest people in the room, just about anywhere, that article is an awesome read.

Montenegro jails Do Kwon, accused of causing $40 billion LUNA crash

Re: I've seen this somewhere before...

Something about half a pack of smokes and a full tank of gas, and wearing shades at night?

Guess what happened to this US agency using outdated software?

Re: Thinking smart

Nah, nowadays us old codgers use SNA over TCP/IP, and this wacko stuff call terminal emulation in KSH.

{gah, I just made myself shudder at the memories of cutting tickets in that terminal emulator}

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Blimey, still working in the corporate world aged 76?

At a guess, pension slaughtered by the financial shenanigans in the 80's/90's. I know of more than a few in that situation over here too.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Ouch. There are some misconceptions

I have 4 flatpak apps that I use. Perhaps fortunately 3 of them share the Nvidia driver library kits. All 4 needed updating for (I dont recall precisely) a glib or glibc change.

a) when the kernel I'm running gets updated, this brings in new nvidia drivers at the hardware level, and thus the flatpak version needs updating. It pulls those drivers *ONCE*, that gets used by all three flatpaks.

b) the glib/glibc change, the flatpak package, only one was pulled and applied to all 4 flatpacks.

Being sandboxed, in order to correctly *use* two of those flatpaks, I did have to add disk paths to the "allow" list. It does add some complexity to the deployment process, but it is certainly manageable. Its *not* something I'd hand to a youngster with less overall compute experience, but perhaps having dealt with VAX to Mainframe data transfers, TCP over SNA, BNC (both) to ethernet, and about 12000 other weird and wonderful moves from (type x to type y) of computing functionality I'm just not that intimidated.

Yes, they chew up more disk space for similar code. But then my Gentoo vm uses 28% of the disk space that my fedora vm uses with pretty much identical software stacks. The Gentoo instance takes about 150 *times* the build time of the fedora one, but it gets there eventually. What I will note is that the flatpak versions of specific apps I'm using are far easier on my mental health than what would be involved with deploying them without flatpak. None of the 4 are ...... common linux applications, 3 pertain to video games I play and one is for managing a (now) rather extensive library of music on our household NAS. (I've been digitizing my mothers 800+ LPs over the last few months). All are only available directly from github, and there are not currently rpms for them in fedora, or rpmfusion. Flatpak gives me the package in a format I can be *reasonably* assured is functional and mostly current.

I do *not* think that in it's current structure and form that (at least) flatpak is *complete and ready for prime time* but I do think that it has enormous potential to make far more non distro based software consistent and available than is currently out there. I would suggest that within reason, it would be possible for *cough* certain large video game producing companies *cough* to package their product with a tweaked and tuned version of wine, making it possible for them to reach a (admittedly currently small) niche market that stands a chance of growing.

AWS teases mysterious mil-spec 'Snowblade' server

Re: "due to the sensitive nature of the device"

Amazon asked the server about the documentation they had prepared about it and the server burst into tears. The server is very sensitive and doesn't want its details splashed all over TIkTok and Instagram any more.

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

Re: Yes and no

transferred to a company, while while not alive, can also not die.

But you can bet your united citizens that it can lobby like a coke infused wallstreet banker at a strip club to get that copyright extended!

Amazon finds something else AI can supposedly do well: Spotting damaged goods

In Transit? how about load/unload inspectors

My SO worked for a certain relatively popular baby goods store up here that was sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed at the beginning of this year. (The things that DONT make the news). They received and sold standard packaged goods of all baby sorts, and also carried several lines of rather well made baby furniture. Said furniture was indeed made overseas, and then container shipped to the Good Old US of Hay. Whereupon goods destined for the units north of the 57th were transshipped through 3 (three) different shipping companies and up to 7 warehouse transfer stops. Suffice it to say that on average, 3 in every 5 units suffered from outrageous amounts of shipping damage. And you know of course, the shipping firms insisted that it had nothing to do with them, the transfers, the repacking on new skids, the onloading or offloading (no that slot in the bottom of the box that goes all the way through the case and is 2" by 6.5" has nothing to do with the forklift operator stoned out of his gourd in Philly moving it off the truck) or the overnight parking in uncontrolled and unmonitored roadside way-stations. Absolutely was the fault of the people receiving the goods at the end point.

*cough*

/endrant

Perhaps putting that tech on cameras at the loading/unloading doors of trucks, warehouses, aircraft handling equipment etc might be better application of the tech?

Feds, you'll need a warrant for that cellphone border search

Just a minor point from the Canadian point of view

The issue we have with that 100 mile limit is that the *vast* majority of Candians live inside that limit. (Albeit on the other side). And, although I'd have to go digging, I'm pretty sure that there is already a case here where the US border patrol stopped a Canadian, in Canada, and attempted to arrest them, based purely on that law. AFAIK it did not end well for the US officials *or* the individual being arrested.

As for the "we're just gonna grab an image of your phone before you go" bit, it won't matter if you're a citizen or a "foreigner", that bit they will get a judge to approve, one way or another. Might involve a dead judge or two, but they will get that written into law, somehow.

XFS bug in Linux kernel 6.3.3 coincides with SGI code comeback

jake:

Most (even bleeding edge) active releases are running 6.2. I have a gentoo image running 6.3.3, but no xfs there, its just to verify a build I help with. And the fix is already available.

I do hope you are keeping those 4.19's patched up, there were some ugly issues for which backports were issued.

Twitter now worth just a third of what Musk paid for it

Re: Crazy valuation??

@jmch:

There are additional costs now, something called "Interest Payments", and things like "Unpaid Bills" and fallout in the form of "Lawsuits for Unpaid Bills and missed Interest Payments".

Its a spiral, and since the puffball of value was so outrageously high when it started, its going to take a while before it plows face first into the basement floor.

Meta promises UK it won't pilfer rivals' ad data to build Facebook Marketplace

Meta mathematics

See items 1 and 2 in the inset in TFA.

/mzvoice "We'll rejig things with new systems and new education for the worker drones. Once that's done, we'll have an inviolate system in place that will solve these issues. If some moron in our advertising department f$%ks up, it will be *their* fault and we'll be able to fire their ass" /mzvoice

Sorry, that's how I read it.

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

they just keep tweaking the things that are relatively easy to get at and ignore the more fundamental issues that plague their products

This right here. Affects *all* the damn software out there. There is no will to attack issues that will take time, skill, talent, effort and money.

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Xrays.

Since the actual hardware was run by an ancient sun hardware machine, the *scans* are marshalled by an ancient winxp box. Dead hardware.

Overall *replacement* of the xray system would be in the 7 figure range.

Brand new system, 2 vms. Two addon cards for the connectors, (Serial and Centronix). Spend 2 days getting the pass-throughs set-up to the vms and boom. Cost? less than 4K

Yes, both talk to the interwebs, but the base install of linux firewall is (block everything) and whitelist things they have to talk to, and the inbound/outbound connection upstream is a proxy host, that has even more fire-walling and limitations.

The images for the OSes are backed up weekly. The data never lives in the vms, its pushed up to a central repository.

Believe me when I say this, this arrangement is far more common than *anyone* would like.

Sonatype axes 14 percent of staff, reminds them not to talk to the press

..."Top Heavy" teams.

i.e., they let the 'spensive folks go. Saves more munny. Mind you, I'll bet that this company will suffer from the "expired certificate fallout" in about a year or so.

Don't turn it off and on again: Expired Cisco cert cripples vEdge SD-WAN kit

I think we can tag this to the

Layoff costs from last quarter. It seems they let one body too many go from the relevant department...... /boardroom discussion

Anyone around these parts keeping track of the number of IT related layoffs in the last two years? I'm thinking we should start calling it the 'great thinning'.