Posts by A Non e-mouse

Uncle Sam claims H-1B fraud crackdown is working as registrations drop 25%

Re: The New Republic?

The damage Trump, et al., are doing will take decades to repair.

Royal Navy freshens up ships' electromagnetic warfare defenses

My limited understand of current energy weapons (i.e. lasers) is that they're not strong enough at the moment to do kill shots in a second or two: The beam has to point at the target for a period of time. So I suppose if you detect an energy weapon you might be able to do something to disrupt it before it causes fatal damage.

UK Ministry of Defence is spending less with US biz, and more with Europeans

Re: Protection comes with business

It is a pity to have to see that Republican Fools will learn how easily they are parted from their money.

As has been mentioned in these forums: Trump knows the cost of things but has no concept of value.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

I would say that they won't have to buy health insurance: But then remembered the current state of the NHS.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Repeat after me: Use the right tool, not the fashionable tool, for the job.

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Re: If it lands on Trump...

..of the poisoned mind?

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Re: Another idea

Oh - I agree that's the case now. But back when Horizon was first conceived...?

Re: Another idea

Post Office aren't pure businesses: They have social benefits too. It's a means for people to collect their benefits, so it has to link back to central government systems to confirm what should be paid out. It also acts a basic bank for people who can't get a normal high street bank account. You can also process some government paperwork through the Post Office (Car tax, identity/passport)

You either have a whole load of different apps for each use case or a bespoke one size fits all front end.

Re: The utter shittiness of English law

Judges and juries make decisions based on the evidence presented to them. In this case the evidence presented was flawed.

Google admits depreciation costs are soaring amid furious bit barn build

Google, Microsoft & Amazon each spending $75 billion this year on servers.

That's a staggering number of servers. If you assume each server costs $50k (Which I doubt it's that high - even including overheads like network switches) that's still 1.5 million servers. Per Annum.

Further, assume each server is only 1U. That's enough to fill 35,000 42U server racks.

All to stream cat videos and LLM hallucinations.

M&S takes systems offline as 'cyber incident' lingers

As for why contactless payments are down, with no mention of chip and PIN payments being affected, M&S hasn't responded to our questions

As a consumer, it seems Chip & Pin, Contactless and Apple/Google Pay are all separate payment authorisation systems.

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Re: Dementia

Yes, they did cover Biden's mental health. They said apart from old age, he appeared to be fine. Whereas Trump was clearly showing mental health issues.

Dementia

There are psychologists who think Trump is suffering dementia and aren't convinced he'll be able to survive his full term.

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

NLite

The big use case of NLite wasn't so much stripping stuff out, but setting defaults and automatically including patches & Service Packs into the ISO.

Europe's cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers

Re: Moving away from the hyperscalers is not straightforward

That assumes you've written your app to run in a Docker container in the first place.

Some stuff you can't containerise. And others are using much higher level APIs for doing stuff in Google/Amazon's cloud.

I seem to recall Microsoft setting up a company in Europe (In Germany?) which aimed to allow Microsoft to supply Office 365 but gave greater separate between the US HQ and the servers in the EU.

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Re: Up or down...???

Sorry. Guilty as charged.

Re: Quietly quit?

Reminds me of an Al Murray/Pub Landlord quip when talking about the American war of independence: The American's see it as a great victory. The British see it as a lucky escape.

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

Re: Good practice

It always amuses me hearing some of the far-right (and not just in America) saying they don't want immigrants when they were probably immigrants not too long ago.

IBM's z17 mainframe – now with 7.5x more AI performance

'Cause your data is already in the Z17 and mainframes are really good at pumping data around and manipulating it.

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

Research has a very large hysteresis. So cutting research doesn't hurt you today. Or tomorrow. Or even next week. But when it does hurt, you know about it - and it's not quick to turn back around either.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

I would ask: "Did Trump not think China would retaliate?"

And then I realised 50% of that sentence is superfluous.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Failure of management

Bad managers, especially ones that show a lack of respect towards others (& especially their reports), cause more problems than the occasional underperformer

These (allegedly) fly on the wall documentaries from America often have a shouty boss: It sets a bad example of how to behave as a boss.

Re: What management need to know

The more you know about a subject the more you realise you don't know about it.

Home Office haunted by 25-year-old asylum system

Oracle Forms, Visual Basic 6, Oracle DB, MS Office Automation, FaceVACS, VB.Net, and COM+

That's an "interesting" mix of technologies. It's almost as if it's not a coherent system but a mess that no-one understands.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: The best way to learn something is to teach it

I think it was Feynman who said something like "If you can't explain a subject/concept you don't truly understand it."

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Those who don't teach don't realise what a skill teaching/coaching is.

One aspect of that is knowing your subject (and not just knowing what someone else's slides say)

Far too many corporate instructors fail on both counts.

On the rare occasions I'm in a course with a teacher who both knows their subject and can teach I really go out of my way to recognise them as they are too few of them.

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

No malware written in Perl, yet, to avoid reverse engineering?

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Re: Deeper problems

That particular trait affects many people in IT: Doing something because it's kool rather than because it's needed.

VMware sues Siemens for allegedly using unlicensed software

Given a large enough corporation some unlicensed installations would not be beyond belief.

I'm not denying mistakes happen. But once lawyers get involved they want everything tripple checked. And being so far over your licensed limit is inexcusable.

I can't believe Siemens got all shirty with VMware/Broadcom without first checking they were correctly licensed in the first place.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: Really...?

And now the National Grid confirm there wan't a single point of failure in the electrical supply:

bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdjy4m0n1exo

Really...?

This totally smells. Places like Heathrow have multiple independent connections to the national grid, plus backup power too for critical/safety systems.

There's got to be something else going on.

After three weeks of night shifts, very tired techie broke the UK’s phone network

I blame the boss!

Pulling all nighters for three weeks is clearly not going to go well! On top of that, doing something critical solo...

It was inevitable.

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

There's rarely a single cause of a failure. I'm sure DEC/Digital's management didn't help with some of their decisions, but the pace of evolution of the humble PC was quite fast. The PC was soon moving up into the midrange server market and, for their low (relative) price, PCs were "good enough".

DEC/Digital, HP, Sun, SGI, etc just couldn't compete. Even IBM with their "big iron" felt the humble PC snapping at their heals.

'Once in a lifetime' IT outage at city council hit datacenter, but no files lost

Re: Did they try turning it off and on again?

You usually test turning off one IT system. It's very rare that you test turning off your entire IT estate and then bring it all back online. You usually discover circular dependencies. The classic being you can't login to your SAN/VM farm as authentication is via your local AD - which is hosted on said platform which is offline because you can't login to turn it back on again.

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

Re: Aaaarrghh

Some of the new fast charge stations in the UK have a massive battery bank behind the scenes to smooth out the spikes on the grid.

Dash to Panel maintainer quits after donations drive becomes dash to disaster

Open Source started back when software was smaller and simpler and much was written by Universities. Software, and times, have changed.

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

He clearly owns the supereme court as they crowned him King by saying any of his actions were immune from prosecution.

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Google are pushing the certificate industry to reduce certificate lifetimes saying we should all automate certificate replacement rather than doing them by hand.

It seems Google need to dogfood their own PR.

Man with artificial heart survives over 100 days outside hospital

Re: From 100 days to a lifetime?

Even in the 24th century artificial hearts have to be replaced occasionally.

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

Re: Yet weirdly

I suspect an ERP won't manage the council tax: It'll just have an interface to that system to record the monies coming & going out.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Re: Really?

Some of that is due to feature bloat. Who remembers installing NT4 off of a CD-ROM. You try fitting a Windows O/S on a DVD nowadays.

I'm not convinced there's been much change in the fundamentals for desktop O/Ss in the past 20 years. Sure, they're being made more secure through better software engineering techniques, but actual features? The last biggie was hot-plug (Esp USB) which came in XP (And some vendors manually back-ported to Win2k!) And maybe TPM?

Otherwise, all that's happened is they've been painting fresh lipstick on the pig.

I think there are a couple of reasons admins put off upgrades. Many sysadmins have experienced upgrades breaking existing features. (I don't mean planned deprecation, just good old fashioned bugs) Secondly, vendors don't always make upgrades easy. I've come across one application where you had to export the config (as a text file) manually edit it, and load that config back into the freshly installed software. When the config is 20k lines, how confident are you that you've edited all the right bits in the right way?

If upgrades were easier and more reliable sysadmins would be more than happy to regularly upgrade.

Strap in, get ready for more Rust drivers in Linux kernel

Re: Beware geeks bearing gifts

Today's Microsoft isn't the same as the one from the Steve Balmer era.

I'm not trying to say it's all roses now with Redmond, but it's less hostile to the outside world.

UK must give more to ESA to get benefits of space industry boom, says Brian Cox

I always thought Brian's performance in the Bourne films was some of his best.

Trump says US should kill CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

Pulling the funding requires Congress to revisit the Act

Since when has that stopped the Orange One?

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Re: they're not like us

It goes 88mph too!

How the collapse of local cloud provider caused biz continuity issues in UK government

Outsourcing works well for services that are consumed by both public and private sector. (e.g. Office cleaning) It doesn't work well for services that only the public sector operate. (e.g. Prisons)