Posts by TaabuTheCat

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

Re: Why

Suicide knobs.

Get ready for Clippy 9000: Microsoft exclusively licenses OpenAI's mega-brain GPT-3 for anything and everything

Re: Onto a Real Winner if you're into Crap Tat on Tap? Or is ManKind Captured by Virtual Machinery?

Is that you GPT-3?

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

The point?

I don't know the point for the Linux version, but for Windows it's part of the MS ecosystem with GPO configuration, somewhat tighter security controls (PUA blocking/SmartScreen, etc.) and IE mode because we cannot dump the need for Java in the browser (thanks Oracle EBS). So for us, it's a way to force people off IE, add some additional configuration control and security, and keep running legacy crap. A better Chrome than Chrome - just barely.

She was praised by the CEO and promoted. After her brother and mom died, she returned from compassionate leave. IBM laid her off

Well...

They finally found a use for Watson. Amazingly complex AI needed. (If %age > 50)

Ever found yourself praying to whatever deity runs Microsoft Teams? You're not alone

Teams is the new Outlook

Once you get them hooked, you've got them for life.

Apple: Yeah, about those ground-breaking privacy features in iOS 14 – don't expect them until next year

Re: Disappointing they are delaying this change

Been doing the reset thing too for as long as I can remember, but you're not discovering that setting with going to look for it. On one hand I'm glad it's there, on the other I'm disappointed that Apple buries it. And it they are removing it in ios14 then all the talk of privacy is just that.

Google Chrome 85 to block ads that hog power, CPUs, network: Web ads giant will black-hole 0.3% of web ads

For the love of a hack,

Can someone please, please hack the thresholds and turn this into a full-time built-in ad blocker???

Bunch of mugs keep risking life and limb to 'crockery bomb' sad little roundabout

Driving directions

Go to the tea in the road and make a right...

Bratty Uber throws tantrum, threatens to cut off California unless judge does what it says in driver labor rights row

Re: Haven't been to Austin in a while

And sadly, Ride Austin (a non-profit) just folded due to the pandemic. The drivers loved working for them - they made more money than with Uber or Lyft, and the company had a lot of "firsts", like allowing female passengers to request female drivers. So sad to see them gone.

From 'Queen of the Skies' to Queen of the Scrapheap: British Airways chops 747 fleet as folk stay at home

Amazing plane

I got to fly to/from Mexico City/Orlando in the cockpit of a 747 at the invitation of a KLM check pilot I knew. What an amazing experience. But it was so odd - it was like you were flying the cockpit - like the rest of the plane behind you wasn't even there. One of the landings was manual and one was automatic in crappy weather. Tossup on who did it better. :) Still, what a great experience never to be had again.

Frippin' heck: Watch out, chin-stroking prog rock fans. King Crimson distributor Burning Shed says it's been hacked

Pefect

The one title that fits: "The Incident"

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

How quickly we forget...

Only last time it was Crucial.

https://www.storagereview.com/node/2676

NASA spanks $34bn on a disposable rocket – likely to top $50bn by 2024 moon landing

Re: Disposable

What better place? Check this out: https://www.k-state.edu/nbaf/

NBAF is BSL4 - this one's for animal disease, but at $1.25B you could build a whole bunch of these for a fraction of what NASA is spending.

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

About time

Finally. It looked like a duck, walked like a duck and quacked like a duck. But the tech bros said it was a Zebra, honest it was.

How long before they buy legislation at the Federal level to override this decision?

IVE HAD ENOUGH! iQuit. Jobs done. Jony cashes out at Apple to run his own design biz

Good riddance!

Long overdue. Apple, please go back to FUNCTIONAL design. I'm typing this - more like trying to type this - on a MacBook Pro with a barely usable keyboard because Jony cared more about thin than usable. And that's just one example of his broken obsession. I hope his last design on the way out the door is the consulting deal with Apple - all appearance, zero functionality.

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

OK, I'll admit

You had an usual way with words Andrew - and not always in way I could understand. Many times I'd have to read a paragraph or two more than once to figure out what it is you were saying, but nonetheless, it's this diversity of style that makes a place like The Reg unique. Hope whomever follows you will have the same passion you brought to your stories, and will be just as inclined to kick the hornet's nest on a regular basis (copyright anyone??). Good luck!

Not another pro-Brexit demo... though easy to confuse: Each Union Jack marks a pile of poo

PooPrints

A rather novel solution, and where I live a lot of apartments are starting to require owners with dogs to sign up. Leave poop behind? They DNA match it to the dog/owner. Pretty much solves the "It wasn't MY dog." excuse. (pooprints.com - and no, I have no affiliation. I just think it's a good idea.)

Only one Huawei? We pitted the P30 Pro against Samsung and Apple's best – and this is what we found

The best camera

is the one you have with you.

Tired of smashing your face into the brick wall that is US net neutrality? Too bad. There's a long way to go yet, friends

Yeah, right.

The only thing being argued here is how the corporates are going to divvy up the pie. Our screwing is guarantee regardless of that outcome.

No yoke: 'Bored' Aussie test pilot passes time in the cockpit by drawing massive knobs in the air

There's a bunch of these on FlightAware...

Here's a fun one: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/DEFHN/history/20160312/1236Z

Search around - there are a lot more, some of them are really impressive.

Down productivity tools: Microsoft Teams takes a Monday tumble

Re: Credibility.

How? Because if MS/Oracle/Google/Amazon/et al have their way pretty soon the cloud thing will be the only choice. And even before that happens, as more and more people move to shaky cloud services there's this weird reverse herd immunity thing going on, where no one can point the finger at anyone else for their crap decision to move to the cloud, because they've made the same stupid decision and they're down too! So no one is vaccinated from the stupidity and everyone is sick at once. Joy.

Stormy times ahead for IBM-owned Weather Channel app: LA sues over location data slurp

Re: Tech/Syntax question

But how do you separate surveillance communications from app functionality? If the app makes an SSL connection "home" to function, there is likely no way to filter out the privacy data included in that stream. How many apps function without connectivity somewhere? Very few these days.

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

Re: Threaded comments are nice

Agree John, it's as close as you can get to the old, simple, eminently usable front page from a while back.

Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait

Patching has been a shitshow for months

I'm glad to see the semi-annual release has finally caught up with the Patch Tuesday fiasco that's been going on for the last six months.

And don't even get me started on the cumulative update deltas that totally break CBS from month to month. What the actual fuck have these guys been smoking?

Party like it's 1989... SVGA code bug haunts VMware's house, lets guests flee to host OS

Re: A standard dating back to 1987 - and a bug fixed in August 2019?

Sorry - meant 2018. Really wish I could time travel.

Re: A standard dating back to 1987 - and a bug fixed in August 2019?

Color me confused. If the KB is right the fix for 6.5 was included in the August 2019 patch release (Build 9298722). How is this just becoming news now?

Tesla's chief accounting officer drives off after just a month on the job

Howard Hughes

The sad part of watching this is we desperately need people like Hughes and Musk - entrepreneurs with an engineering mindset willing to THINK BIG and take HUGE risks. There simply aren't many people willing to roll the dice and suffer the humiliation if it all goes sideways, and that's a shame. I truly hope this is just a temporary setback for Musk, and once he gets some sleep things will be better. The world will be a lot duller without Musk and his dreams.

SHL just got real-mode: US lawmakers demand answers on Meltdown, Spectre handling from Intel, Microsoft and pals

El Reg "broke the news" - really?

Sorry for the rant El Reg, I still love you, but I'm getting annoyed with the constant chest thumping about "breaking the news" on Meltdown and Spectre. I found out about it on Reddit a day before El Reg wrote the first story. (You too??)

Guess in your world reading about it somewhere other than a "news" site doesn't count, but in my book when someone "breaks the news", it's typically novel information they discovered, usually through investigation or research, not something being publicly discussed for a day on one of the world's most frequented websites. Just feels like you're taking credit (over and over again) where it's not due.

Maybe I have it all wrong - maybe you were hot of the trail of Meltdown weeks before you "broke" the story, but you made no mention of any investigation in your original piece and the details in the original story looked a lot like a rehash of sources being quoted on Reddit from the day before.

Feel free to correct me if I have this all wrong. I may have simply got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

More stuff broken amid Microsoft's efforts to fix Meltdown/Spectre vulns

Add Symantec Endpoint Protection to the broken list...

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH248552.html

"However, Symantec plans to release a hotfix to address the issue, and recommends that the Microsoft Windows Security Updates released on January 3rd, 2018 updates not be applied to systems until a hotfix is available for the affected versions."

Working AV or vulnerable system? Guess that's your choice.

AI in Medicine? It's back to the future, Dr Watson

More on the MD Anderson failure

https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-centers-ibm-watson-project-fails-journalism-related/

$62M down the drain, no competitive bids, bypassing the IT department, not integrating with the Center's EMR system, and on and on. And the worst part - no improved outcomes.

Journalism played a role in all the hype too, so good on you Andrew for bringing some attention to this subject.

FedEx: TNT NotPetya infection blew a $300m hole in our numbers

$300M!!

"Holy crap!" said every CEO in America. "Let's convene an emergency meeting of the Board and all the IT/Security department heads and find out exactly what's needed in the 2018 budget to prevent it happening here!"

And then I woke up.

Google Cloud rolls back changes after 18-hour load balancer brownout

Too big, too complex

I'm starting to get the feeling these systems are getting too big and too complex to be managed for uptime. Not only Google and AWS, but look at O365. They just had a Sharepoint incident where file sharing stopped working (yeah, ironic) and it took them 10 days to patch all those who were affected. Think about that: If you were at the end of the queue for the fix you lost file sharing capability for 10 days! And the whole thing was caused by a bug in an "upgrade".

Perhaps they need to stop working on "upgrades" for a while and start working on rapid rollback. I still don't get how MS can upgrade (break) everything at once, and then need 10 days to unwind the changes. Something doesn't make sense.

Stop this crazy crusade! Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon scold FCC over net neutrality

Re: The fix is already in

Normally I'd agree with you, but Tom Wheeler (former FCC chair) actually tried to make things better for consumers and he's the reason Pai is now on this crusade. Who would have guessed it? Wheeler was a former high-ranking cable/telco guy and there was zero in his background that would have led you to believe he'd be anything but a shill for the cable companies. Turned about to be just the opposite, which must have infuriated his former masters.

Pai? Yeah, he knows who signs the checks.

Alert: Using a web ad blocker may identify you – to advertisers

Re: Rage!

Well, now I'm not so sure this new FF whitelist setting fully works. EFF's Panopticlick is still able to enumerate fonts (unless it's just guessing?), although the site referenced in this article now only sees what's in the whitelist. Not quite sure what Panopticlick is doing to get around the whitelisting - assuming it really is.

Re: Rage!

http://www.ghacks.net/2016/12/28/firefox-52-better-font-fingerprinting-protection/

Kind of an ugly solution, but it works.

Trump cybersecurity order morphs into 2,200-plus-word extravaganza

Re: Sounds great

I agree reports are mostly useless, but requiring section 9 companies to expose their risk management policies is worth putting up with some of the less meaningful reports.

A big part of cybersecurity risk today is that no one is shining a light on crap risk management practices - you know, like trading profits on the back of someone else's risk. Make them do it publicly, so when they do get hacked and lose all of OUR data, they can't claim they were unaware of the residual risk.

Veeam vaunts its va-va-voom as 2016 revenues unveiled

Earned growth

Unlike the current trend to grow by taking hostages, these guys earn their growth.

What a concept: Build a solid, reliable product with useful features, support it well and treat your customers with respect. Why do so few companies do this?

US cops seek Amazon Echo data for murder inquiry

Re: Interesting...

More interesting would have been Amazon saying there was simply nothing to produce. Telling that they are using legal weasel words instead, clearly aimed at placating customer concerns about privacy and keeping Echo sales strong.

A microphone in every room, listening 24x7, all connected to a service you don't control. What could possibly go wrong?

The Life and Times of Lester Haines

2016 - Can it be over soon please?

What a crap year with a lot of losses. You may not make the "celebrity" news Lester, but you were a star around here and will be missed.

Exclusive: Team Trump's net neutrality guru talks to El Reg

Re: Trump appointments

"...no matter what the question asked, the response gets twisted to whatever is on that day's talking point memo"

Well, a good part of that is because the "news readers" (what used to be real journalists/reporters) constantly let them get away with it, either through lack of preparation or the fear of being blacklisted for future interviews. Where's Mike Wallace or Ted Koppel when you need them??

Microsoft still working to fix Outlook sync issues

New SLA Needed - TTR (Time to Remediate)

One of the interesting things I notice watching the O365 "Health" status is just how long it takes Microsoft to fully remediate an issue. You'll see an issue get opened and normally diagnosed quickly (within hours, sometimes a day), and then a patch developed for what's normally a regression caused by some other work that's been done. And then you wait. And I mean wait. I've seen many issues take WEEKS to get fully deployed. MS dutifully keeps you notified of progress (X% complete, day after day), but if your account happens to be at the end of that repair chain you are waiting a REALLY long time to get your service restored.

It's one of the interesting things about cloud services I don't hear many people talk about, and that's the time it takes to repair a massive amount of infrastructure even when know how and have a fix available. I expect this to only get worse as the cloud continues to grow.

Pair programming – you'll never guess what happens next!

Re; Dumb idea - Nope. Stereotypes.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2527153/it-management/opinion--the-unspoken-truth-about-managing-geeks.html

Credit where it's due - I saw this on a Reddit thread and I'm glad I did. This is the closest I've ever seen someone get to describing us.

My Dell merger wish list

And please...

VMware, get your product quality back up. You may not be able to attract everyone to your technology but you can sure as hell drive them away with crap QC, and over the last 18 months you've been doing a fine job of it.

VMware pulls buggy NSX release from distribution

VMware according to Dirty Harry

I know what you're thinking. "Did he regression test six modules or only five?" Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a critical patch you need to apply to fix the last set of bugs we released and could blow your entire compute environment clean off, you've gotta ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?

Klepto Zepto could steal millions in looming ransomware wave

Re: "look at their 'requested' documentation"

Why do they open it? Closure - that incredible human *need* to tie up loose ends.

You've just handed me a wrapped up box with my name on it that could have something REALLY IMPORTANT in it, and you're asking me to just throw it away?? But then I'll never know if it WAS something important. No closure.

That's why this behavior is so incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to stop.

The SPC-1 benchmark is cobblers, thunders Oracle veep

Classy response

I really like the tone of the Datacore response. So often these arguments turn into mud-slinging affairs that quickly turn ugly. Look no further than Chuck Hollis vs. Nutanix. Not a shining moment for either party.

Apple pollutes data about you to protect your privacy. But it might not be enough

Mandatory reading

That link to "surveillance capitalism". Thanks very much for that.

Is VMware the power it once was?

Switching

In all the years I've been running VMware - not as many as Nate, but close - I've never had a real reason to look elsewhere. The releases mostly had new features relevant to my environment, and most importantly, they were stable right out of the gate.

The last 18 months have been a shitshow for VMware customers. Bug after critical bug, and it's a total crapshoot as to when show-stopping (data loss, PSODs) problems will get fixed, and fixed for good. The quality of phone support has gone way down as well - the only metric appears to be number of cases closed.

Toss in View (we're VDI for about 95% of our desktops) and the release cycle has become a little shop of horrors. Never used to be this way.

So if VMware is even slightly worried about remaining relevant and keeping long-time customers, they need to get their focus back on quality. There's simply no reason to pay premiums for crap software and support.

Intel's Broadwell Xeon E5-2600 v4 chips: So what's in it for you, smartie-pants coders

Re: hear that

Yeah, it's pretty obvious now why MS is going to limit/license Server 2016 based on core count. Bet VMware follows along shortly with a new vCPU tax.

Attack! Run. WTF? A decade of enterprise class fear and uncertainty with AWS

Not quite

":Jeff Bezos' web services unit delivered not just a technology platform but way of consuming business tech: paying for what you consume..."

As Nate keeps pointing out (and rightfully so), no, you don't pay for what you consume, you pay for what you provision. Ignore that distinction at your own financial peril.