Posts by tin 2

Workday talks up AI agents platform that will reap rewards of staff cuts

They have something like 20,000 people looking after a website which is fundamentally a load of text boxes wrapped in web 2.0 nonsense? Wow.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

I know we've been saying it for years but WHY is anyone at all trusting MS with all their shit when they can't help but act like a dodgy sharp-practice startup?

Workday erases 8.5% of workforce because of ... AI

Workday. Wrapping text boxes in a web UI and charging business for the pleasure, since 2005.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Literally building the infinite monkey nonsense generating machine.

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

I'm still frequently accidentally spamming the keyboard shortcut that gives me a very helpful interrupting popup to tell me Cortana is depricated.

Vodafone and Three permitted to tie the knot – if they promise to behave

Not sure why the downvote, this is exactly my experience!

Musk and Trump to fall out in 2025, predicts analyst

Oh no? Really?

Who are these amazing analysts? Trump falls out with literally everybody. It's nailed on to happen.

Mystery Palo Alto Networks hijack-my-firewall zero-day now officially under exploit

Lots of people, unfortunately. I guess at some level you think "it's a firewall, there's no way that will have a weakness"

Also I'm not entirely sure "lock it off from the outside, cos you trust everything on the inside, right?" is an awful lot better.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Re: I can't disagree more about CSD

I especially like not being able to grab hold of anything to actually move the fucking window somewhere, so I for one welcome our titlebar eliminating overlords.

Cisco combines Meraki and Catalyst into single wireless brand

It's great to see Cisco catching up to Aruba after like 10 years....

French govt finance panel mulls nationalizing Atos

Remind me again about the insurmountable inefficiencies of Government running stuff in-house?

Broadcom juices VeloCloud SD-WAN for AI networking

Not being tied to VMware is a good thing when they're still tied to Broadcom?

Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing

Re: At least...

I'm willing to bet that if Bing suddenly became the bastion of not tracking and slurping, it would attract more people than it does currently.

Floppy discs still run a U.S. metro? Japan steps in with 'project kill floppy'

I don't get it.

If it's working. Leave it. Just cos it's old doesn't mean it's shit.

Sounds like there's several other problems that need attention first.

Microsoft says its Copilot AI agents set to tackle employee tasks in November

It sounds doom-y but I have to agree.

My experience is of course limited, but I've seen precisely 0% accuracy/usefulness come out of everything I've chucked at this supposed "AI". All it's actually achieving is wasting time and god-knows-how-much energy seeing if it can be of any use, and finding that it's not.

That can't be good, and chimes not-at-all with any kind of efficiency, be that sacking dudes or supposedly complimenting them, and critically to every single organisation considering deploying it en-masse: customer satisfaction.

Critical hardcoded SolarWinds credential now exploited in the wild

They rushed out and performed a comprehensive code review in response to the last couple of exploits then. Lovely job.

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Re: "The overwhelming majority of these were completed successfully"

....and your system does a test run, and punts any anomalies to a meatbag for resolution.... once you do that THEN you migrate the data... Right?

This is pretty much the same business and world over. Amazes me that the overlords get so out of touch.

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Re: Interesting that there is an allegation of hiding the badness from the elected members.

That's why said Chief Executive needs to grab any and all of the councilors that will be in any way so grabbed, and go for several beers/coffees with them, to educate, persuade and cajole. That's part of their job surely?

Capgemini wins deal with UK tax collector worth up to £574M

Our government departments need to stop spending such a ridiculous amount of money on shite IT. There it is, that's the take.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Is nobody going to comment...

... that "how its systems interact with the Vodafone platform" means precisely nothing, and

... supplier (presumably) to the baggage handler straight under the bus, when it's the direct responsibility of the airline involved to handle the bags. It's as if we've all started accepting that outsourcing stuff means the provider of the actual service to the customer is perfectly allowed to immediately absolve themselves of responsibility.

Wanna curb datacenter outages? Try combating burnout with shorter shifts

Can not understand how this got a downvote, it's succinct and spot on.

Tech is GREAT if and when it does something appreciably better for appreciably cheaper. If those things are not met, continue employing, paying and looking after enough meatbags. It's astonishingly simple.

Blue screen of death or Eurovision's Windows95man performance – what's less annoying?

Re: The english clearly still have the language of prurience cornered. :)

a million upvotes for Fascinating Aida!

Waymo robotaxi drives down wrong side of street after being alarmed by unicyclists

100%. The operation for safety here is to roll along behind the obstructions. Not least because it didn't appreciably overtake anything.

The more concern for me is it just moved into and back out of another lane without any indication of it's intention to do so. That's unnecessarily dangerous regardless of any of the other factors, and leads to the question if that's missing out of it's software, what else is?

Google ponders making AI search a premium option

"AI enhanced".... "premium".... hahahahah oh go on tell another!! :)

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

"We have a robust set of methods that help us proactively detect content that violates our guidelines"

also generated by AI, clearly.

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

Re: Why break things with gratuitous change ?

While that is to be applauded, it still could all easily go under microsoft.com. This is just rebranding for rebranding BS sake.

HPE blames GPU shortage for contributing to unexpected sales slide

"At this point, readers might wonder if, in that context, HPE's planned acquisition of Juniper Networks is such a good idea."

Truth, and not just for the reasons discussed in the article. Problem is, and I mean this with all goodwill to Neri, that he literally can't say anything else. The doublespeak in the call (networking is soft/buying jnpr will fix it) means nothing and we still have to draw our own conclusions.

Strikes me HPE might be able to win providing some services relating to code efficiency?

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

This is a bandwagon like I've not seen before. Sure there have been many "must have" largely marketing BS in this industry in the past, but for everyone to go all in on something that really hasn't proven anything yet, I just find bonkers.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

"Firefox did not keep up with the market and what people really want"

I'm bemused by this quote. I think it's pretty clear that browser market share is just market distortion.

Whatever comes pre-installed (historically IE, now Edge, Chrome, Safari) gets used the most. Whatever gets advertised as the thing you should definitely use instead (Chrome, and to a lesser extent Edge) often replaces the pre-installed thing.

There's no competition here based on what people want.

Re: Whatever.

I probably don't understand the ins and outs so much, but for a long time relied on whatever browser to actually tell me what was going wrong when something was going wrong.

My personal browser of choice is also Firefox.

Re: Firefox just does not work on some web sites.

I don't run into many at all that won't work on FF - and the response for me is that the site is not incompatible with Firefox, it's incompatible with the supposedly open and well-documented standards that these bloody browsers are supposed to render.

I remember IE6, the stuff that was written for it's extended ecosystem, then the abandonment of that browser and multiple, very expensive websites that didn't work in anything else, even when IE itself was long dead, and the support, migrations of browser and application platforms, and the extreme expense involved. That should be a history lesson that's recent enough for all in IT to remember, or have the story passed on as recent enough to be vivid.

Demand the website, webapp or whatever the hell else is supposedly written for the web - whatever that means anymore - works in _all_ the browsers. One of the easiest ways is to obstinately continue to use FF, even if just for that one reason.

Indeed. I shall not.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

Re: It depends on the use-case

Strong disagree. More should run their own if they can. Likes of MS and Google are deciding mail works to their rules, and they need to be shown that the rest of the internet will not accede.

Amazon calls off $1.7 billion iRobot buy, blames regulators

soo..

they went bonkers splashing the cash while they thought payday was coming, and now it's not, immediately and desperately need efficiencies... Entrepreneurial...

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Re: Building software is hard...

This is bang on. It's how the humans involved respond that is key.

Official: Hewlett Packard Enterprise wants to swallow Juniper Networks in $14B deal

Re: does juniper do much in the "AI" space?

"HPE seems to have so many different switching platforms under their roof, hopefully they can consolidate the user interfaces at least"

There's no chance of that. Comware was on the block 7-8 years ago, and yet go on their site today and you can see their "new" (and recently re-renamed) Comware range. ProVision-based hardware is still sold and recommended on the website even tho that was getting retired 3-4 years ago. Under HPE's tenure another two breeds of switch were invented. Integration on the control plane side has been inexplicably poor - try to determine which of the CX range of switches can be managed in Aruba Central? Who can tell? The only switch range they've properly EOLed is the Aruba MAS, which is probably because the 3 people in the world didn't get upset too much.

HPE has no strategy, leadership or anyone with any gumption or skill in this area, and so it will continue.

HPE said to be moving in on $13B deal for Juniper Networks

Re: Installed the last ToR and core switches, management switches from Juniper in new DC build

"Should HPe properly integrate the Aruba and Juniper product lines"

hahhahahahahhahahhahahhahah! hahahhaha! hahahhahahah! hhahahah!

Hhhahahhah!

hahahahah!

oh go on, tell another!

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Re: From what I can recall ....

Came here to say the same. I'm sure it's a non-starter if it requires cables draping across the pavement.

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Amiga pedantry. Sorry.

A2000 still had a 68000. Possibly it was upgraded or was a 2500, but it didn't have an 020 -because- it was a 2000.

Re: Out in the fields

and Slack, Teams. Throw in a bit of a dodgy network into the mix and their error handling is revealed to be... well... absent.

Re: The real lesson...

This.. That's the reason and most certainly NOT that C is in any way inherently better at it than assembly!

Mozilla CEO pockets a packet, asks biz to pick up pace the 'Mozilla way'

Re: "Backed by the non-profit that puts people first"

Indeed.. it needs some research into the yacht(s) and mansion(s) factor. For corporates that seem to be charging a "reasonable" price too, and ofc public bodies (heated swimming pool in your Yorkshire manor, anyone?)

Re: "Backed by the non-profit that puts people first"

Have to agree.. I'll support in non-financial ways, as I believe we need to retain some diversity in the space, but won't be putting a single £ into the pot when there's also one single person taking 5500000 of them out.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

"the horror that was nested tables inside nested tables inside nested tables"

Oi!

(returns to web app created in 2022 that does exactly that.... and is nice and responsive with it TYVM)

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Re: Two sides of a coin (aka Someone wanted a new printer)

Yep! When I broke the laserjet 4050 here, I immediately replaced it - with an identical one from Ebay.

Also I learned my lesson, don't try and clean them :)

Brit borough council apologizes for telling website users to disable HTTPS

Re: Dear editor

AFAIK http/2 can also be vastly slower than http/1.1 so it doesn't follow that one means the other and therefore something that it might do, but quite possibly not, should be cited as something it directly does.

US Trademark Office still wants to keep faxes, but is willing to try this cloud thing

Fax is still a fascinating punchbag

The IT world has inexplicably failed to create anything as simple and effective as the fax, yet every time someone either looks to keep or replace them, we scoff. I find it most interesting.

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

Replace with AI? Hahahahahahahahahahahaa

I presume they haven't actually *used* any of the stuff around at the moment masquerading as AI.