Posts by steviesteveo

Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million

Re: ...unless you have no other option

That's the perks of being a core business function. I wonder if it's linked to their capacity on android - a $23bn company really could get by on a handful of CI/CD machines but it's not worth the brain cells of minimising linux vms specifically for building the thing that makes all the money. Then, if the Android team have all this (elastic) capacity, the iOS team are going to want at least parity

There's developer value in the luxury of never having to wait for a build machine and 200 machines must realistically get you there

EY exposes 4TB+ SQL database to open internet for who knows how long

Re: Ernst & Young

> A Dutch cybersecurity outfit says its lead researcher recently stumbled upon a 4TB+ SQL Server backup file belonging to EY exposed to the web, effectively leaking the accounting and consulting megacorp's secrets

It's an accounting and consulting megacorp, apparently

I came into this already knowing the names of the big four consulting firms because I work in IT and these are major employers in my industry but also Connor did absolutely nothing wrong here

Re: Ernst & Young

It's interesting what counts as a shibboleth in IT. I remember one Reg comment that asked "Am I supposed to know what an ERP system is?" to which the answer is less yes or not and more "how long did you say you've been doing this?"

I think rings a bell level familiarity of FAANG, the big 4, maybe the biggest international banks(?) are just about on the level of expected commercial awareness for an IT worker who's been around. Everyone had to ask "what's Deloitte?" at some point but it means you've only just found some of the biggest potential employers in your industry

DNS downing clouds is boring: IBM Cloud is experiencing a quantum computer outage

Re: Is anyone even affected?

No one's email is down and therefore it cannot be a major incident

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

Re: Almost a direct contradiction…

I'm not saying Amazon have threatened his family but this is what it would look like

With impeccable timing, AWS debuts automated cloud incident report generator

Re: But did it work on Monday?

It's been on someone's wishlist for years and no exec was saying no this week

UK waves £750M supercomputer contract at HPC builders

Re: Fujitsu!!!??

Fujitsu seem to have played an incredible have your cake and eat it move by promising to step back from public contract tenders while the Horizon inquiry was in progress and then just continuing as usual

Carnegie Mellon team claims vector-based system can turbocharge PostgreSQL

The scene they paint at the end sounds incredibly bleak. Imagine being in the middle of an outage, not really knowing what's happened, and just having to click the autotune button until prod comes back

Auction house Sotheby's finds its data on the block after cyberattack

Re: Hm. might have pissed off people with deep pockets

No such thing as an anonymous buyer now. This could haunt Sotheby's for years to come

OpenSSF warns that open source infrastructure doesn't run on thoughts and prayers

We saw it with leftpad - the problem there was all these foundational projects pulled whatever was at the original source on every build rather than their own trusted versions. People who were big enough to know better were trusting a third party to be there 24/7 or the Internet broke

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: Is this not just how they work?

It is an interesting example of implicit biases of the creators, though. The highly educated fundamental AI researchers have decided to test it using roughly analogous tools to how they themselves were tested and the same "if you don't know don't leave it blank" type incentives have emerged despite just being high scoring outputs with no other context

It's an interesting one because I have never considered a fundamentally different way of testing this either. The best I can manage is just making wrong answers more expensive

Tony Blair Institute: UK needs bit barns to lead in AI deployment, not training

Re: TBI,

It's the worst of both worlds, though. You're accepting that all we can do is pay license fees for whatever the real powers decide to export. If it's truly important we shouldn't give up this early or we'll look back on it as a surrender

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: Private or Work?

"Labour will build on the Online Safety Act, bringing forward provisions as quickly as possible, and explore further measures to keep everyone safe online, particularly when using social media." was a manifesto pledge.

Congress tries to outlaw AI that jacks up prices based on what it knows about you

It's basically company scrip with extra steps - the plan is to leave you with at most zero money

The most frustrating part is how short sighted it is. It manages to make such a comfortable way of life obviously and imminently unsustainable. We could all live like medieval kings but some MBAs have decided to give us civil unrest instead

Trump's budget bill bankrolls $85M Space Shuttle shuffle

El Reg's "well, you can just chop it up l, I guess" feels prophetic. They're going to cut corners and make a permanent mess of it

Folks aren’t buying the PCs that US vendors stockpiled to dodge tariffs

Re: Bullet dodged

Future retro computing youtube channels are going to be spoiled by all the new old stock available

Microsoft pulls plug on generous Azure credit program for startups

It's interesting as a signal that it wasn't paying off. I'd have thought getting startups committed to your infra was a license to print money once a few of them took off but this suggests that startups are even riskier than MS's modelling thought.

Anthropic won't fix a bug in its SQLite MCP server

Re: Yeah, ain't that brilliant?

It's a proper classic. There must be loads of examples in beginner tutorials online, usually followed by a note not to do it like that in production

Is this AI building bugs into AI?

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

> How do they even notice? Apart from a few desultory "just click on OK/next/whatevs - its pretty obvious" style conversations, is it really an issue?

We shouldn't understate how much of a block in user flow the "wtf is this, we'll do our best" dialogs are in practice

UK stats body snoozes legacy tech overhaul as Treasury tightens purse strings

Re: Austerity Rach strikes again

And MP pay goes up on the same day everyone's bills go up. It's revolution bait. If the illuminati were in charge they'd think the optics of that were too much

Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users

Re: "Personalized news"?

It's an understated point - users getting their news from the default feed on their start menu are unsophisticated. I'm unlikely to be the same demo in the first place

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

Re: The easy route

I quite like the theatre of a SCIF: I needed to go into this special room to get this information. The information must be important. I think that's an understated part of not having it next to twitter on your phone

Oracle faces Texas-sized lawsuit over alleged cloud snafu and radio silence

Re: Same old... same old...

"and paid the amounts that he did if he had known that his private information would be maintained using inadequate data security systems"

And that suit is not shy about the cost of those licenses

That's the key promise behind all these fusion reimplementations - it'll be tough and scary but at the end the new software's the business

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

It's one of the classic complaints people have against public works - all in favour of the benefits but shouldn't it be better organised? Fix all the utilities at the same time when you dig up a road rather than repeatedly dig it up, reuse conduit that's already there and so on. It sounds positive

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

It's really just a natural continuation of his work for the CIA. If anything it's on us for being surprised that he thinks spying on everyone is still good business

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: This is why ergonomics matters

300 locations all coming up with the same solution should have been embarrassing for the project. There's an obvious requirements gap that you don't need to be a pro to solve

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

Re: Shareholder

"However, the rapid rise in the cost of electricity post-pandemic, coupled with the rising cost of skilled IT staff, put cloud delivery under new cost pressures *that had to be passed on*, from hyperscalers to platform provider, from platform provider to software provider, and finally from software providers to clients."

That Gartner quotes absolutely nails why this is now wobbling - AWS etc just couldn't possibly absorb any increased costs whatsoever

CrowdStrike unhappy about Delta's 'litigation threat,' claims airline refused 'free on-site help'

Re: The last "help" you want

Especially when the problem is an infrastructure one - we don't actually need the vendor to fix our crowdstrike installs. *We* have to go through all our end points in safe mode to fix your mess

If crowdstrike offered to help by punching bitlocker keys into corporate machines you'd have to supervise them the whole time anyway

It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

Vendor starts talking about causing pain. You're negligent if you don't react to that signal

How two brothers allegedly swiped $25M in a 12-second Ethereum heist

Re: Thanks for the complete explanation

It's incredible stuff, really. The idea that your transaction potentially won't even get recorded if some random middleman doesn't front run it and that's just how it goes amazes me

Cloud server host Vultr rips user data licensing clause from ToS amid web 'confusion'

Re: Legal boilerplate... [Vultr Birdshit!]

"We know most of our customers won't be able to understand this" is a diabolical touch

UK telcos didn't collude to put Phones 4u out of business – judge

It means you'll never have a satisfying conclusion to the issue. "None of the surviving evidence showed collusion" is a hell of an asterisk to be left with

Capita faces first legal Letter of Claim over mega breach

Re: So maybe...

It's definitely a bad advert for centralising all the important data

The problem with things like pensions is that's generated a lot of the sensitive data I would want protected. It goes beyond what I hand over: I want my pension fund to keep a good handle on my entire file

Re: "Class action" ? UK ? Really ?

I took it as Americanised reporting of going for a group litigation order

Lenovo profits sink 75% as PC demand continues nosedive

Re: Knee-jerk economics

"Shipments peaked at 350 million for 2021, and PC makers believed that the total addressable market would remain at those heady heights"

Why would you think that?

GitHub publishes RSA SSH host keys by mistake, issues update

Re: Sex, Drugs, Money and ...

I never got the sense that those enthusiasts online even needed interrogated. If you've already told me your security strategy when I was just passing by on the internet then that secret was not going to get kept very long in an investigation

AWS puts datacenter in shipping container for the Pentagon

Re: so ...

AWS is probably going to use it as a scare story for how much on prem costs these days

Thunderbird email client is Go for new plumage in July

Re: " technical and interface debt accumulated over the past ten years"

And what incredible volunteers. There can't have been any motivation beyond sheer principle. You have people who will keep a desktop email client working for ten years. Send these people a cake and tell them about your other projects

Brit civil service claims there's enough money for mammoth ERP refresh project

That's an unexpectedly profound question. On balance I'd say it's a shibboleth. I would wonder what someone's IT experience covered if they hadn't absorbed that one by osmosis. E stands for enterprise so it might also be a small company v big company marker

Enterprise resource planning is just one of these bread and butter concepts that sits in the background and quietly makes the world go round

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

Re: “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams."

I found that quite interesting. We all know that software and servers is just a corner of what makes up a tech company but you suddenly wonder if he thinks it's a really clever way of saying he'll really be running everything

On the 12th day of the Rackspace email disaster, it did not give to me …

Re: Right.

I think we might find that watching the cloud provider lose all the emails is just as much of a resume updater as doing it yourself

On the other hand, I can't imagine how ruinous doing it properly and having regular backups under your own control would be in data egress fees alone. It seems like a no win situation where, as ever, the best case scenario is no one notices that the line item you keep fighting for just saved the company

Intel aims for lower-power GPUs as Nvidia pushes pricey energy guzzlers

I see it as really short termist. They've basically given up on the next generation of IT growing up with geforce. It might even reverse the mindshare as kids come through who never even saw a 1.5k GPU growing up but remember the AMD graphics in their Xbox

Tesla has a lot of work to do on its Optimus robot

Re: What's the point of a humanoid robot?

But it also needs someone to push it onto stage at point. Let's wait and see if a future working model gets any heavier

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

Re: Enter candidate for dead simplest text editor

> Even on Twitter, that renowned haven of deep analysis and reasoned critical debate, there are people saying "my word the commenters really don't get it, do they?"

Could this perhaps be picking up on a simple text editor with hyperlinks and markdown output but no programming features being more of a Reg *writer* than Reg *reader* thing?

UK Home Office awards Oracle a deal extension worth tens of millions

I think I will always remember the OVHCloud customers on twitter asking how to enable those disaster recovery features on the web interface, while the building was on fire

British Ruby conference cancelled after diversity row

Re: @Ben

Yeah, apparently he was so worried at the mere prospect of legal trouble if a sponsor was to pull out that he thought it was better to let all the sponsors down.

It doesn't ring true to me, basically.

Get your kit off for Putin, win an iPad 2, Russian ladies told

sigh

"But what other word should I have used that the English-speaking world would have immediately recognized as quintessentially Russian and female?"

Problem: you don't think your audience understands enough Russian for you to make jokes in a foreign language

Solution: use any word whatsoever, even if it's about grandmothers.

CERN 'gags' physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment

Im meeeeeeeeeelting

re: Posted Monday 18th July 2011 14:23 GMT

I think that's a misunderstanding of terminology. "Acidification" isn't crazy melting, Wizard of Oz stuff. It's a change in ph.

Terminator because of the bit at the end of Terminator 2.

'Being cyber-stalked is as bad as being raped, or in a war'

Bit of perspective needed

There's a middle ground between "Cyberstalking is the worst thing ever" and "Cyberstalking: not that big of a deal".