Posts by Pirate Peter

Cisco thinks Mythos means instant death for unsupported networking kit

seen it before

I have been working with a customer holding their "partner" to account, looking at their monitoring system which the partner did not want to give me access to I see some KPI massaging by their AI Agent call logging and resolution system

it see a hung service, logs a call, restarts the service automatically and closes the ticket

15-20 minutes later the same service change and the action is repeated

that one service caused nearly 50 tickets a day all successfully closed on a first call / action by the automated system without actually fixing the underlying issue, we fixed the issue and call rate dropped as did the KPI's for the partner

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

premium win11

I am just waiting for a "premium" version of win 11 with no AI slop builtin, no doubt it would be a totally free to install, but has to be connected to the internet to use and fully subscription based so MicroSLOP could milk the User dry for every penny / cent that could

Re: "perhaps because people just don’t see much value in paying extra for an AI-capable PC"

or perhaps the majority of people see no value in AI Slop

with more and more companies blocking the AI SLURP BOTS from their website quality training data is getting harder to find, a lot of the slop comes from social media, or like Microsoft using GitHub repo's to train LLM's for coding, hence a lot of projects are being frozen or moved to non AI slurping platforms

also people think all the new LLM model are vast improvements? nope, they have to keep releasing new models as they old LLM's aren't train on new data, they can use data inputed by users to add to an LLM but don't usually add large new datasets to existing LLM, they want to keep that for the new LLM or people will keep using the old LLM and the AI companies can't make more money

Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner

Re: Has anyone tried sat services?

why would you want anything to do with starling / muskrat?

one question

if your calls / text / data traverse starlink satellites owned by space X (an American company) can US law enforcement use the patriot act to snoop on global communications of any mobile operator using them?

I have no trust muskrat or any company he takes and part in or owns, he is to far up trumps arse and only in it for his own profit and monopoly

Hugging Face rebuilt a third of its infrastructure after OpenAI agents ran amok

Re: Cheating

they have no ideas like "concepts" AI models are just massive probability databases, there is no intelligence, its works purely on the face B follows A etc based on the data it was trained on

if a probability of the answer you need is not covered by its training data it will just make shit up / lie (hallucinate) often in a convincing manner

British Army finds a new eye in the sky after Watchkeeper woes

billy Connelly nuclear bomb salesman sketch

up til now UK defense (and other countries) reminds me of the billy connelly nuclear bomb salesman sketch

arms companies could make all these weapons and sell them to the armed forces at huge cost with the likelyhood they will never be used

now Ukraine have turned that upside down and the economics of the system no longer work, as Russia launch cheap (£10k-£20k) Iranian drones and the west were supplying missiles at £100,000's to shoot them down

now those missiles are used for the cruise missiles, and cheap homegrown racing drones chase the Iranian shahed drones

the other thing coming out of Ukraine is the speed of innovation and change to combat jamming and countermeasures mean normal procurement processes take too long as by the time the process is complete the spec for the weapon has changed and original spec ineffective

Re: BOGOF?

and what good publicity, assuming they survive in ukraine

it does seem to be the place to prove drones and missiles at the moment

Ireland stalls €1B Microsoft tender amid digital sovereignty questions

problems, problem

moving to linux , libra office etc is not the problem

it is the lack of support staff knowledgable of linux, also smaller range on tools to control and audit networks, mdm etc

and even if you have a single MS server for a critical function everyone will need a CAL to access it, so Microsoft will still win

you have to do an all or nothing approach

and don't forget to ditch the "chrome " browser as well, although I have come across a number of sites / apps which will only work with it

it would be a big project that will take 3-5 years minimum to complete and remove Microsoft / google entirely from and environment

pilot a small department first to find al the software and skills you need while still paying the M$ / Google taxes then once ready a gradual roll out

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

It has its limited uses

AI is not the everything to everyman solution it is being sold as

but it has its uses in limited cases

it can be good at finding bugs / vulnerabilites in code, (so long as a human verifies the finding)

it can be helpful writing code, (so long as the human using the tool understands and verifies the code generated)

But it is only as good as the data the model is trained on, so the old adage of shit in = shit out still stands

when more and more companies are blocking the scrapers from the AI houses the pool of quality training data gets smaller and the percentage of AI generated slop in the training data increases and consequence is more shit in, so therefore more of the output is going to be shit and its only going to get worse over time

the best models I have seen are the ones trained on a small set of private data for a specific task, the big public LLMs tend to be the worst performers as they fall foul of trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

network doom

the other good one is the network version of the original doom game

if there were 4 of you on the network playing, alll with the cheats for the BFG9000 with unlimited ammo shooting the heck out of one of the hard to kill baddies you could bring a network to its knees

as the network version of Doom 1 was sillily in that every bullet fired was a separate packet on the network, so 4 players with unlimited ammo finger down on the trigger constant sent hundreds and even thousands of packets out into the network, and it was more fun if you were on different network segments as well

we used to use it for out of hours network testing while having some fun as well, if the network coped and survived all was good :)

Europe's new import rules are coming for your bargains

Re: Seems like nothing more than a money grab

"where the cost of the tariff exceeds the cost of the goods."

that's the point, they want to kill the market and B2C for lots of little packages, they want the likes of the Chinese business flooding the customs / mail centres with millions of A5 or smaller Jiffy bags to say its no longer viable and withdraw from the market

the problem for the consumer is there are no alternatives outside china who can provide the services,

I have often wondered for a longtime how it can be economically viable to buy a part costing less than a pound (inc P&P) from china and get it shipped to my door in a few weeks

MPs tell Brit government: Sort out your tech sovereignty or get left out in the cold

countries at the mercy of rogue US presidents

as we have seen by trump and his tariffs and now limiting access to AI models the US can no longer be seen as a dependable partner

at trumps whim he tries stop access or taxes / tariffs countries into submission (worked well with Canada and Mexico (NOT) )

we have had to many years of status quo which has lead to reliance on big tech based in the US and we are now reaping the benefits of not developing home grown talent and systems by being blackmailed by trump

time to stand up to the bully and tell him to do one

The new Siri makes one of Apple's most convenient OS features a cumbersome mess

no Siri or Apple UnIntelligence here

both are disabled on my iPhone 16 as both are crap, same with CarPlay, can't get on with it so disabled and use my cars satnav and basic bluetooth and it work a treat from the buttons on the steering wheel

NHS prescribes half a million Copilot licenses for its paperwork headache

Re: National Humiliation Service

that a long winded way of saying

"shit in = shit out"

:)

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

as I have said before AI pushers use the same MO as drug pushers

they give away free or very cheap loss leaders to get you hooked

then once you or your company are dependent on the drug / AI they ramp the price up as they know there is little if anything as you / your company is addicted and all you can do is cave in to their demands / extortion

and getting clean again will involve trying to work out and remove a load of the slop that was created while you / your company was addicted

same as smoking and social networking I've seen the crap it causes and never partaken (despite company insistence) in AI slop, after doing various exams and seeing behind the curtain there's no intelligence just complex predictions to work out B follows A in the alphabet base on what its tables have for the probability

Three in ten HP customers still clinging to Windows 10

seen it time and again, a relative buys a barely minimum spec / built to a price HP laptop after believing the BS the salesperson tells them then 3-6 months later brings it to me to make it run faster

looks in task manager, finds memory maxed out and paging like no tomorrow to disk, stripping out all the bloatware HP etc put on it and the copy of Nortons / Symantec the salesperson said they had to have improves things, but then I tell them they need to upgrade the ram or buy better spec devices last time, and get the story the salesperson said it would be good for 3 years (right and unicorns exist) after much debate they agree to buy some memory and surprise it runs much better, but for the cost of the original laptop and the later addition of memory they could of had a much better device for the same money if they understood the specs properly at time of purchase

Windows 11 update preview promises faster launches, puts Task Manager on NPU patrol

should be called an ENU

I think a more accurate name for an NPU would be

Enshitification Processing Unit (ENU)

AI to infest eight in ten premium phones within two years

Re: 100% of iPhones will have "agentic capabilities"

they try bundling it with Siri and car play so if you turn of Apple unIntelligence then you have to turn off other "KEY" services,

I shout "whoopeee" as never used Siri, (got the wife she knows everything) and CarPlay is down right annoying and distracting, so just use standard built in bluetooth in the car and inbuilt nav unit

AI, Siri, Car play etc can go do one as far as I am concerned, and the apple sales staff are very confused when you tell them you disable all their lovely "key" services, and you don't want Apple News, arcade, music or any of the other subscription services they want to upsell you :)

Re: Flip Phone revival

if they require it, I don't do business with them, same as if the require twatter or arsebook

never used or wanted any of those sources or viruses or malware on my device, and never will

work tried to say I needed instatwit, I just pointed out my phone is a personal device and I don't allow any meta apps or services on it, if they require me to have work email/messaging or other apps they need to provide me with a work phone, and total silence from manager who looked confused with my response

if they need me I I am happy to get call or text, SIMPLES

Microsoft makes Copilot easier to summon, harder to ignore in Office

can we have an "Co-Pilot go do one" button

no matter how much MicroSlop push Co-pilot Slop generator I will never us it (or any other slop generator)

due to all their ramming it down our throats I have ditched windows and working on ditching office as well

work have moved more than 90% of users off windows and are moving more towards Webex etc and ditching teams, and I think we are due to start testing Libre office internally as well

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

Re: why

"They did Truth Social last June."

they won't do it again

as why take down the site (although the tangerine tyrant owns it) as he makes himself look more stupid than the worst village idiot, and gives away information about what he is planning

tangerine tyrant screws normal people yet again

so it started with his tariffs that screwed over all Americans and many other people around the world

then he started this Iran war (which Putin loves as it splits American resources for war and less support for Ukraine)

due to the war Iran has blockaded the straight of hormuz, meaning fuel prices are up screwing everyone globally

due to fuel issues airlines will be cancelling flights meaning globally people are being screwed again for holidays etc (wait for food prices going up yet again and shortages due to flight cancellations / aviation fuel shortages)

now it's disrupting our hobbies with ubuntu being targeted

thank god the tangerine tyrant has no more terms in office he can run for,

Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back

AI vendos akin to drug pushers?

they offer you a free or cheap product to get you hooked and dependant the push the price up as you are addicted to AI

Palantir's NHS future in doubt as ministers eye contract break

Re: Palantir's USP

problem is, yes we have the home grown talent (and it works for the big 4-5 mainly) , and yes we have small businesses who would love a bit of the action, but before they can get big enough to challenge the bit 4-5 consultancies they get bought out before they can become a threat / challenge

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

only 3% willing to pay to use AI slop

"or come up with uses for AI that excite more than the 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who are willing to pay for Copilot?"

so all those billions pissed down the drain on AI Co-Pilot SLOP and only 3.3% are willing to pay for it?

and how many of those are internal users at M$ vibe coding all this crap and bugs

90+% of the small number of people I know use co-pilot only for 1 thing, teams transcription summarisation and that's it (oh, it can produce some funny images of trump spitting his dummy out and losing his shite :) )

Azure outages ripple across multiple dependent Microsoft services

Vibe coding strikes again??

I have heard (off the record from someone who worked at MS ) the internal MS staff have to use AI tools for all coding, and not allowed to write code by hand

so I wonder how much of this is relying on AI to generate the code for these updates and patches, then using AI tools to test it before deploying

if it is the case, my answer would be that if they can't make it work reliably why should we use it

I have already seen the mess one of our devs is making using various "AI coding tools" and how much longer it is taking to clean up when it all goes wrong, as it does more often than not

Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details

Re: The real reasons?

I bought a Lenovo without an OS to avoid the Microsoft tax (saved £120 on the PC) and just loaded mint onto a blank disk :)

FTC tries to un-Zuck Meta's grip on the market by dragging it back to court

he's running the place like a mob boss

you can just see it

hey vance, Zucks kicked me off arse book, but he let me back but now won't pay his dues, won't give me a skim, or kiss my fake tanned arse

that's bad boss, what you got on Im

nothing vance, that's the problem, no government contracts, I can't threaten a billion lawsuits as he would laugh and sue me for more, even if I won he would pay it out of petty cash

vance asks, want me to try sending the FTC boys round again boss

they failed last time, tell them failure not an option this time or I'll sue them

Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age

there is a lot more to this than meets the eye

its not only the cloud compute stacks like Azure, AWS, G-Cloud etc

its the office suites that got with holding data in cloud drives, its the email in office 365 / gmail etc

its the desktop OS which phones home with all sorts of data due to AI / Co-pilot

then don't forget mobile phones running android and IOS controlled by google and Apple

and if the EU politicians are involved they will still be arguing about it in the next century, add to that Hungary who will tell Putin everything and block many things (yes there is Russian influence inside the EU as well)

so my view is the EU will never get its shit together and it will be yet another project that becomes a financial black hole with EU commissioners just on the gravy train for what they can get

which is why many brits voted to leave the EU

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

2038 is the next fun date

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

2038 is a time computing problem that leaves some computer systems unable to represent times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.

The problem is systems which measure Unix time—the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970)—and store it in a signed 32-bit integer. The data type is only capable of representing integers between −(231) and 231 − 1, meaning the latest time that can be properly encoded is 231 − 1 seconds after epoch (03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038)

so that will be the next big party time for IT

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

"They probably get it from ChatGPT."

don't you men "Co-Pilot"

sound like they used their own ROI calculator

as per the title

it sounds like someone asked their AI generated ROI calculator how long to rewrite the windows code base using AI tools

and they got the answer which as normal is as realistic as a unicorn prancing through their office

mind you it depends what they have been smoking they may well have seen said unicorn in their office :)

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

its not "mission creep"its a data grab by marketing / advertising departments

anything that "requires" me to create an account I walk away from, if an account is optional but offers time benefits in the future I "MAY" consider it, but its a cost benefit analysis

e.g. my coffee vendor of choice gives me free drinks every 6-10 orders as points depend on order value, that is a fair trade, other vendors nope, not enough benefit for me

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: Shout It From The Rooftops

the problem is we have no UK companies with sufficient money to build data centres and the government won't pay for infrastructure, they only want the private sector to built it, then lease to them at an extortionate cost

vey short sited and then open to a foriegn company / investor buying it then back to square one of data sovreignty

the only way is for the UK gov to build and run it, but. that will never happen

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

the problem is although the data is held locally have a look at where all the authentication traffic goes

the directory service behind it all is global for resilience, even though the company I worked for only had data in UK data centres the authentication traffic was going world wide

and one an EU cloud takes off it will be targeted for buyout

so having a NON US (EU) cloud providers makes wonderful sense until it grows to the point Google, AWS, M$ see it cutting into their margins and see it as a threat

then one of them will try and buy it to remove the competition

even if the EU say no US company could by it, all AWS,Google or M$ will do is set up a separate company and base it in the EU, then with a loan from the parent buy it and marge it someway

add to that no doubt the big 3 clouds would probably try and find a way to make it not cost effective by using data export charge etc

personally I think the US has had to much influence and control over IT / Cloud etc and its time for that to change

the main benefit of cloud infrastructure is the ability expand and contract your compute estate while only paying for resource consumption

if you own your own systems, then your costs are constant regardless of the amount of resource consumption, and once you hit the limit of your resources you have to go through a CAPEX tender process and al the delays associated, all of this leads to poor performance due to over provisioning to sweat the maximum out of your assets (as demanded by the bean counters)

you then have to put in place expensive security and monitoring systems to fend off attacks, which in a major cloud environment are shared amongst all the customers so you get best of breed security and monitoring for a fraction it would cost on your own systems without any long contracts and escape penalties

so cloud does make sense so long as you can keep all the costs in check

Jassy taps 27-year Amazon veteran to run AGI org, which is now definitely a thing that exists

Re: Why is quantum computing being bundled with AI?

and makes it easier to split off and bin when the bubble bursts (hopefully soon)

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

somewhere a village is missing its idiot

its just the US found him and made him their president (not once, but twice!!!)

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

yep, roll back all the codebase to the last win10 version without all the AI enshitification and start fresh

ditch the crap win11 UI and all the advertising and monitoring

fix all the security issues and bug

add the AI features back slowly as "OPTIONAL features"

I suspect they know if AI is optional then the majority of people won't use it as its crap, so won't be able to show shareholders massive numbers of people having it installed / using it and the shareholders will ask why they should keep providing more and more money into this AI blackhole

Re: Apple

I have done that on my several Mac machines and phones,

I do wonder if they collect stats on how many devices have siri and Apple UNintelligence diasabled

it would be an interesting stat to know

95% of our tech team ditched win 11

we were recently taken over and as part of a tech refresh our tech team was given the option of new win11 laptop or MacBook pro's

95% took the MacBook pro's due to enshitification of win 11 with constant working features being broke with AI or AI forced into places it wasn't wanted

personally in the last year I have removed all M$ OS and applications from my machines (6 of them) for a mix of Mac and linux

One-fifth of the jobs at your company could disappear as AI automation takes off

Re: Running Schedule

we are already in the minefield of fixing projects created with VIBE coding 6 months ago and trying to fix issues or update due a customers new requirements, and its is taking 2-3 times the time it would normally

added to that customer dissatisfaction when confronfronted with agentic AI systems trying to get simple things done with banking / insurance etc

but C Suite execs still keep falling for the AI snake oil (koolaid) pedalled by the salesmen that knock their doors

they won't gaslight people, they will just move on to a new company and put on their CV what a wonder job they did rolling out AI and snake oil and likely get a bonus / pay rise at the new company until found out then move on and rinse/repeat until the AI bubble finally explodes

Retail giant Kingfisher rejects SAP ERP upgrade plan

Re: That should be where you start

all the vendors have ROI (return on investment) calculators which produce results about as real as unicorns

Re: At what point --

seems SAP are the latest to follow the

1:- try and force customers off legacy systems and onto cloud base SaaS platforms

2:- once on cloud insist on subscription models which are only available at discount with long multi year deals

3:- once customers are tied in to multiyear SaaS deals hit them with eye watering price rises disguised as AI services

4:- if customers resist AI costs then force customers to accept price rises by removing all the cheaper non AI options

you mean the supermarket is learning what its like to be one of their own customers?

seems kingfisher are finding out how it feels to be a customer of there's

things that don't work, hidden costs, price rises, websites that are frustrating to use, a take it or leave it approach

as with customers they have the option to take their money and business elsewhere

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

early april fool?

i had to check the date, this sort of thing is normally an April fool joke

a fool and their money ..........

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

it'll all end in tears

all the banks ( bank of England, the fed etc) are warning of a crash in the market due to the extreme levels of investments, and circular investment in AI, warning that are very similar just before the dot com crash

they are warning that extreme percentage of investment in indexes like the FTSE100 / Fortune 500 is all going into a handful of tech companies, and that companies like OpenAI are taking out huge loans then lending that money to customers to pay for OpenAI solutions, so the money goes back to Open AI (circular lending)

added to that general public seem to be resisting AI services and agents, as causing a negative experience, I have screamed at a number of them "let me talk to a human"

so I am hoping the bubble burst sooner rather than later

Twist in Tesco vs. VMware case as Computacenter files claim against Broadcom, Dell

Broadcom unload both barrels into feet again

as per the title

they are trying to railroad all their customers into the cloud foundation service, as massive increase in cost, they want to do away with any perpetual licensing and replace with expensive subscription licensing to keep their income streams in a very healthy state

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

silly question time

what is the reason to have to move it from Virginia to Texas?