Posts by A Non e-mouse

AWS adds nested virtualization option for handful of EC2 instances

It's turtles all the way down....

Cisco set to release home-brew hypervisor as a VMware alternative

If people want to stay with Cisco for voice, I'd have thought small companies would move to cloud Webex and larger companies would use Nutanix or Hyper-V. I'd be surprised if large customers would want another hypervisor to manage.

Dijkstra’s algorithm won’t be replaced in production routers any time soon

Dijkstra’s algorithm is only run when there is a change in the network topology: It isn't computed for each packet. Unless there is a step-wise improvement in speed or ease of coding of the new algorithim, there's little incentive to replace it.

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

I'm surprised there isn't already a #pragma directive to say to the compiler: "Don't be clever here, just do as I say".

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

You have to treat AI generated code like StackOverflow answers: They're useful pointers but the code mustn't be copied & pasted into production until you *really* understand what it's doing and how it works.

UK to properly probe xAI to test if its revolting robo-smut generator broke the law

It's also one of the only platforms that doesn't "toe the line" and holds the UK government to account

Private Eye has entered the chat.

Offcom announced “We continue to demand answers from xAI about the risks it poses,”

That's not a difficult question to answer: It's a mis-information, hate & kiddie pr0n distribution system with no social value.

If you can't work out what to do, resign.

NASA delays Artemis II to March after hydrogen leaks bedevil countdown test

There's a whole debate around humans Vs drones for exploration that I'll skip here.

The underlying issue is that the Chinese are likely to be putting boots on the Moon "soon". So America is trying to resurrect some of the nostalgia from the Apollo era and trying to one-up the Chinese by going to Mars. Unfortunately, getting to Mars is way harder than going to the Moon.

Unfortunately, Boeing got involved. Then politicians had their snouts in the trough too and costs and timescales went the wrong way.

America's trying to salvage something from its sunk costs and we've got the Artemis programme doing a flyby of the Moon.

Didn't the Space Shuttle have similar hydrogen leak issues?

Oracle expects investors to pump $50 billion into its cloud this year alone

Re: Fantasy money

I've got someone from a company called "Enron" on the phone. They're asking for their business play book back.

Couldn't Larry just sell one of his yachts?

Broadcom 'bulldozes' VMware cloud partners as March deadline looms

Re: Why am I ashamed of my tribe ?

There are several reasons for being stuck with VMWare.

The first is that some business applications are only certified to run on VMware. Xen, Proxmox,Hyper-V, etc are not supported.

Another is if you've build custom integrations into their platform. Re-coding all of that for another hypervisor isn't a quick & simple job.

Finally, migrating anything more than a couple of VMs to a new hypervisor is not a trivial undertaking. You could easily be talking years of effort - and that's effort that's not actually adding any value to your business.

Oracle silent over user complaints about OCI London 'wobble' last week

Re: Pondering

Plus extra to be told about outages.

PowerShell architect retires after decades at the prompt

Re: the point

The unix world tends to work with text (files)

PowerShell works with objects. No need to format and re-parse data between commands. It's a very powerful concept.

Because of this, PowerShell is less a Bash-type scripting language and more like, say, Python.

Qualcomm CEO pockets 15% pay rise as profits fall 45%

Shareholders

Shareholders don't care about profits: They care about dividend payments and stock price.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Just look at how effective the bans on pr0n, cigarettes & alcohol are.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Re: Amazing memories

or an ultra-premium service, though, it wasn't exactly luxurious: cramped cabin with narrow seats

I went inside the Concorde that's at Duxford and was surprised at how cramped it was. (But if I had the chance, I'd still have taken a trip in it!)

Rackspace tests customer loyalty with brutal email price hike

A 400 percent price increase

I think someone's needs to remind themselves about percentages as it's only a 235% increase. (Give or take a decimal point)

UK gambling regulator accuses Meta of lying about its struggle to spot illegal ads

Zuckerberg is such a nice upstanding fella, I can't imagine that he would be part of such illegal activites. Why, only the other day he helped an old person cross the road and rescuced a kitten stuck in a tree.

</sarcasm>

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: Could be worse

I think there have been several instances of this over the years.

My place isn't a bank or anything special, but any keys to store & machine rooms have huge key fobs on them so you can't even put the key in a pocket. (We often use blanking plates from switches/routers)

A more high-tech solution is to have fancy tags on the keys with sensors at the building entrance so you can't take them out without an alarm going off.

Birmingham pauses Oracle relaunch to get staff on board

I suspect they're referring to changes in internal processes to match Oracle's.

How CP/M-86's delay handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom

Re: "handle 16 separate segments of 64 KB – for a total of one whole megabyte"

I'd been into 8-bit assembly programming as a kid. When I went to Uni and got my hands on a PC I was naturally interested in x86 assembly. After a short while I realised what a mess the x86 CPU was and stayed well clear of it.

80286 & DOS

The problem was that the shipping version of the 80286 chip removed some features Concurrent DOS 286 needed.

Both the linked article and Wikipedia imply Intel broke the C-1 stepping of the 80286 rather than deliberately removing features.

Excellent Article

Thank you

ISS spacewalk postponed over mystery astronaut malady

Sympathy

I feel sorry for Nasa & the astrounauts. They're desperately trying to protect the person's identity and their condition, yet the internet will be foaming at the mouth with theories about who is ill and what the issue is.

OpenAI putting bandaids on bandaids as prompt injection problems keep festering

Decades ago, the Telecoms industry discovered the joys & pitfalls of in-band signalling. (Putting your control messages in amongst the user data)

Earlier Horizon rollout could widen net for quashed Post Office convictions

Re: Anecdotal evidence

Software doesn't just magically appear. There are betas, pilots, and so forth.

For a team following some vaguely sane development practises I'd expect this. But can we be sure Fujitsu were? (You have seen the example code fragments from Horizon posted online, haven't you?)

Humongous 52-inch Dell monitor will make you feel like king of the internet with four screens in one

Re: Above the paygrade of productivity

Hence I want one!

(But I don't go to chiropractors)

AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

Anybody who assumes prices will fall for ever is an idiot.

Intel unleashes Panther Lake CPUs, first built on 18A process

Re: Not again!

Motherboard manufacturers foaming at the mouth at the opportunity to flease sell new motherboards. Think of the shareholders!

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

Re: 32 bits were just right

If you could use 100% of IPv4 addresses, you get ~4 billion addresses. There are over 6 billion people on the planet. Assume one IP address per person. Add a few more for the servers those people are going to talk to and you sail right past that 4 billion number. Factor in that less than half of the IPv4 adddress space is used/usable and IPv4 just can't cut it.

Re: Some of us would like to use it

In the UK ISPs are supporting IPv6. (Not universal, I agree)

But for a server you statically set the IPv6 address and set DNS accordingly.

Re: The real reason nobody wants to use it

If only they'd just added a couple more bytes to the address and left it with room to add more as needed

I read somewhere that the committee looking at the successor to IPv4 ruled out variable address lengths as it hurt router performance.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Not the holy grail

Whilst Rust will prevent some errors (Mainly around memory use), it's not going to prevent all errors. It can't prevent logic/algorithmic errors.

Rewriting an existing codebase in a new language is just going to add a new class of bugs - and that's assuming little to no use of "unsafe"!

And what about Microsoft's fastidious addiction to backwards compatibility - warts 'n all?

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Call me a luddite but I'm not a fan of these digital menu screens. They love to flip between the menu and an advert at a fair lick, so it takes you three times as long to read what's available.

Ten mistakes marred firewall upgrade at Australian telco, contributing to two deaths

Re: Making scapegoats

The article says there were 18 upgrades planned and the first 15 had gone fine.

I can imagine that engineers were getting bored going to meetings to discuss practically the same thing again and again.

Re: Handsets?

Even if the handset has a SIM, it can make an emerengcy call via a stronger non-SIM network.

Emergency calls are *very* different.

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Re: There is no requirement for a specific make of pen

You've missed an important point: Pupils aren't allowed to use their own computer. It's supplied by the school and locked down to something close to a kiosk-mode.

Galactic Brain space datacenter coming in 2027, pledges startup Aetherflux

WHY????

Putting a data centre in orbit is crazy stupid. The first three problems that come to mind are servicing, power and cooling.

Whitehall rejects £1.8B digital ID price tag – but won't say what it will cost

Re: won't say what it will cost

Probably double that before cost overruns and delays followed by the inevitable cancellation and the back handers to the old-boys club members.

FTFY

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

Wasn't there also an issue that Ingress NGINX is hideously complicated so making it secure is really hard - well beyond the capacity of a couple of coders who only have their free time to work on it?

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

Re: a1

They're lambasted when they released the 16GB version. And now they're being lambasted for releasing the 1GB version.

What should they release? One with 3.14GB of RAM?

Speccy clone storms back for Christmas without a shred of Sinclair code

Or the alternative Lego version:

beta.ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/1113841c-596d-4f28-be4a-367cc83e8ed1

Being a bit of a Speccy fan, The Spectrum doesn't excite me - especially as it's not 100% compatible.

If you want a newish Spectrum that's 100% compatible, a Harlequin would be a better bet. They have both 128k and 48k versions. (If you go for the DIY versions, allow a day to solder it)

TryHackMe races to add women to Christmas cyber challenge roster after backlash

This is one of those chicken & egg problems: How do you encourage women (or any other group) to join if there are few/no role models in the first place.

Atlassian ran a tabletop DR simulation that revealed it lived in dependency hell

I agree with Richard 12. Office 365 is a beast and unless you have resource to run a tenant yourself (Hint: It sounds like you don't) Then you need to either jump ship off of Office 365 or pay a 3rd party for an Office 365 service.

BTW - Microsoft rarely deal with licensing themselves (We spend a lot more than you on Office 365 and MS still refuse to talk to us about it) Virtually every customer has to deal with a reseller for licensing.

I'm sure there will be companies out there who specalise in providing IT for the charity sector.

Microsoft wedges tables into Notepad for some reason

Re: For the love of God

Notepad++

6G isn't even here yet but mobile industry wants triple the spectrum

Their problem is going to be that as they go up the spectrum to get more bandwidth, propogation & penetration drop off.