Posts by elip

Wanted: State-backed bandits planning cyberattacks on US infrastructure. Reward: $10m

Re: I would have thought..

Nike, Adidas, and Reebok of course.

Pyjama bottoms crew, listen up: In 2022 we'll still be at home

I would usually agree. Gartner doesn't know shit. However, it seems the lightening has struck on this one. They are correct, nobody I know is going back to the office 100% of the time.

Google cans engineering diversity training scheme after alumni complain of abysmal pay packages

Re: I don't think anyone is compensated fairly, maybe except the top

Hopefully you're speaking of Google and not tech industry in general.

With regards to Google, software engineers are some of the highest if not *the* highest paid people in the company. There are many making 700K+ in salary alone.

The truth is, like at all other places of business, a small handful produces most of the company's value, a giant several handfuls produces a little value, and another small handful shows up and putts around producing no value.

Hard cheese: Stilton snap shared via EncroChat leads to drug dealer's downfall

Chloe gets it! Never crime in a team. Only crime by yourself. Golden rule.

13+ years for some drugs bruh? Fucking amazing...I would think maybe in the US, possibly, but in Europe?!! When do we start locking up every sugar dealer - turns out its more addictive (and worse for your systematic health) than cocaine!

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

Re: Carbon neutral

New Yorker city slickers see shit. Us out in the country, see life.

Re: Carbon neutral

Amen.

I have a feeling most folks commenting have not tried to buy a new car in the last few years. I drive a 2016 Honda Fit, because it was literally the only new car I could afford. Since then, inflation on new car prices has skyrocketed. The maintenance on an average EV is definitely lower in cost and frequency, and the performance cannot even be compared to an average ICE car.

With all that said, yes, absolutely, animal transport is by far the 'greenest' option...I think we should go back to that.

Activist millionaires protest outside Jeff Bezos' homes to support tax rises for the rich

Re: Absolute DREAMING

There is no generalization involved. Worldwide, we're *all* in a better place than we were in the 80s. Do you remember the 80s? I grew up in the middle of the revolution in Eastern Europe. I remember standing in food lines/bread lines and our currency collapsing overnight, twice. My kids have never even seen a soldier working a national curfew/martial law, let alone tanks rolling down the street. They've never seen completely barren store shelves. I've never seen the poor be so rich. Amazing how quickly our perspectives change.

Re: Absolute DREAMING

It's fairly tough for me to believe so many people are ignorant about the improving state of the world (especially poverty - which keeps shrinking and shrinking). Granted I didn't grow up in the US, but no doubt we're all better off now than in 1980. In 1980 my comrades were getting dragged into the woods and shot in the head. At least now some of us get a trial.

Fibre Channel is still around. And now it's end-to-end at a sizzling-ish 64Gbit/s

Not sure why all the calls to 'small numbers' of people still running FC or Infiniband. I've worked at 12-14 different companies of different sizes (from 12 person startups to 300K employee engineering behemoths) in the last 21 years and all were running critical workloads on FC, with some more scientifically inclined shops running Infiniband. Is the author suggesting that mid and large enterprises are running app and db workloads mostly on local storage? If so, that has not been my experience.

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

And just like that, we live in a world where the obvious must be stated. Conversations are sure going to be long-winded from now on.

Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

> Yet some right-wing a-holes are so sensitive about this that they had to transform it into 'all lives matter'*.

What a weird assumption and attribution to make. I'm a left-wing anarchic communist, and I can only reasonably conclude that "all lives matter". Anything else seems highly suspect, and illogical.

Starlink creates risk of internet investment doom cycle, says APNIC researcher

Re: with so much head wind its obviously a good idea

I'm not arguing whether it's *possible* to have high quality ISP service to the boonies. I know it's possible, as I have a good friend running Fiber right now in Indiana without any issues at one of the last co-op ISPs in the state.

>....but the point is precisely that the best solution for everyone would be cheaper, good terrestrial broadband.

My point is, that's great that it's the *best* solution for everyone, however, it has been 30 years, they've gotten 250+ million bucks, and this "best solution" has not materialized anywhere that I know of. Starlink, as with Musk's other businesses, may just light the fire under their assholes to start running fiber out here. Currently, one of my friends a few miles away is switching from his provider - HughesNet - to Starlink, and is seeing impressive performance and lower latency. It is *literally* the current solution to his and likely my problem.

Re: with so much head wind its obviously a good idea

> In short, broadband operators will tell everybody living in the sticks "sorry, not interested, try Starlink". Regardless if people can afford it or not.

So do you want to know what the alternative for people like me out in the "sticks" currently is?

I'm currently paying $99/month for 3Mb down, and 56Kb up async DSL for Centurylink - my county's only ISP provider. I will gladly pay the same price for up to 10-20 times the bandwidth down (according to some current users).

You know what my "broadband" operator that received hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government over the last 28 years in order to "serve the underserved" users tells me now when I complain about their offering?

"Sorry, not interested in offering you a better service. Are you saying you actually get 3Mb down where you live? That's very surprising, as you're so far away from our POP, we can't actually even guarantee that you get a signal out there. You're SO LUCKY!!!"

Under that pile of spare keys and obsolete cables is an IoT device: Samsung pushes useful retirement project for older phones

Wish I could give you more upvotes. I run an 8 soon to be 9 year old Motorola Droid 4, mostly for its unmatched physical QWERTY keyboard. I admit, I use it for texting, notes, and as an ssh client more so than a phone, but it certainly still handles phone calls without fail. :-D Assuming I can keep finding the batteries, and that I can keep builds of LineageOS booting, I hope to run it another 8 years. Yes, yes, of course completely 'insecure' if I can no longer update LineageOS, but then, I tend to use my phone as a largely publicly accessible device that all phones on our current mobile networks truly are.

Failed insurrection aside, Biden is going to be president in two weeks. What does it mean for tech policy?

Re: US (Affordable Care Act)

You're severely confusing the ACA and a nationalized healthcare as seen in Europe. The ACA aka Romneycare, was primarily designed to force *more* customers onto private insurance company plans. It worked, United Healthcare is steadily in the Fortune 5-10 since the ACA was passed. Thankfully the mandate has been mostly rolled back (at least the unconstitutional fees have). We desperately need a "nationalized" healthcare system in the US, though its much more likely to function if created at the individual state level.

Re: Old tech

The age is directly correlated with his senility.

Trump pushes anti-immigrant policy into Biden term with extended freeze on H-1B and other work visas

Re: Full rewrite of H1B is needed

Sure, but previous presidents have had 30 years to do something, *literally anything* to combat the abuse, and Trump has so far been the only president to utter the word H1B. So....maybe begrudgingly give credit where credit is due?

SolarWinds: Hey, only as many as 18,000 customers installed backdoored software linked to US govt hacks

source for this claim

"If you ever wondered how Putin’s Russia was having a disproportionate impact on global affairs.."

What does Kieren believe 'disproportionate impact on global affairs' means? I'm not seeing it.

US Treasury, Dept of Commerce hacks linked to SolarWinds IT monitoring software supply-chain attack

Re: And how stoked am I . . .

Your anger is misplaced. You should be cancelling your SolarWinds contracts, or at the least start questioning your infrastructure choices.

It's pretty common to find illegal activity/fraud around voting, it just usually takes a few months after it matters for the FBI or whoever to press charges. Here's a recent one from my state:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/mccrae-dowless-indictment.html

Here's a recent case from my old state:

https://www.salon.com/2016/02/14/election_fraud_chicago_style_illinois_decades_old_notoriety_for_election_corruption_is_legendary/

Adios California, Oracle the latest tech firm to leave California for the wide open (low tax) Lone Star State

At least HPE is not. Their HQ building remains in the same place as always, nobody's forced to move. Other smaller offices (Aruba, etc.) might be closed, but mostly, not a huge sum to be saved in RE.

Re: they recently made it illegal for the police to "steal" remove or push out homeless tents

I imagine, the homeless.

Re: And in the year 2022

Tangent to this is at least one anecdote: my wife's company (a reigning Fortune 5-10 depending on the year, "Healthcare" provider) had stopped hiring out of California about 2.5 years ago. It simply did not make any financial sense. Her specific department hires a massive amount of RNs to work from home handling various triage duties that on-call doctors do not want to be bothered with. A typical experience level for this line of work is about 5-10 years of experience. Their RNs' salaries in California were somewhere around and often times *more* than most MDs in other states that they would be working on behalf of.

NSA: We've learned our lesson after foreign spies used one of our crypto backdoors – but we can't say how exactly

Re: How do you avoid US spy gear, it is everywhere.

Many companies already run their own routing and some switching on open source OSes (Linux, OpenBSD, etc.). Would love to see some larger server/network gear vendors start certifying those stacks on their platforms. For now, I'll just stick to my OpenBSD, on top of Coreboot, on small embedded platforms. :-)

Re: How do you avoid US spy gear, it is everywhere.

Some of us are old enough to remember, and come from countries where not all that long ago, our overlords, err representative governments took our fellow citizens to the woods for a chat and put one in their heads. Just one literal example from my childhood in Eastern Europe.

Work life balance? We've heard of it. Pandemic means 9-5 shifts are a thing of the past for many

That sounds a lot like me now. In my younger days I'd be that 'go to guy' that everybody went with their questions. I was oddly psychopathic (or extremely dedicated) about figuring things out and solving the roots of company problems, even if they weren't 100% related to the dumpster-fire at hand, knowing someday this ancillary breadth of knowledge would come in handy. It usually did. The amount of self-induced stress I took upon myself as a result, caused massive psychological problems through my 20s and early 30s. I basically didn't know my kids until about 2 years ago (they're 13 and 11 now), even though I've worked 50-100% from home for 15+ years now. In the last two years I've realized I am to blame for all of this, as none of these were expectations of my employers, just mine. I work identical hours wether I'm in the office now or not. I give about 10-15% effort compared to my previous ways, and somehow shit still gets done and done at a high quality, my manager is happy as hell, I keep getting raises and decent bonuses when/if the company makes them available. It took me 40 years to reach contentment and psychological security, but boy does it feel good.

Re: How about post apocalypse kitchen landscapes?

Absolutely rings true here. Jobs are slavery. I wish people realized how little work relative to current job expectations, it is to subsistence farm and make your own food (assuming you enjoy it). I'm 1 year away from paying off this house/land I'm on, and then its good bye rat race. I can finally farm full time.

Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts

Re: Thank you Sun.

"Linux has become the fabric of standard computing."

^^ I'm curious what the cost of this currently is and has been, and would love to see an attempt at quantifying it all. Is it cheaper in the grand scheme of things to pay for overengineered, overpriced SPARC systems, or is it cheaper spending lots of engineer time (and in turn, money) battling highly dubiously tested (or not tested at all) Linux distribution code? I've managed Solaris and various Linux distros over 20 years+ now, and as poor as *some* Solaris efforts have been at times, the general stability has been only second to OpenBSD. Linux kernel 2.4 was stellar. 2.6 started showing some lack of QA, though at great perf boost, so people lived with it. These days, I don't see thorough testing from the Linux community. I could be wrong, as I live in the enterprise, large server + large storage space.

Re: Spend your money now, says Larry!!

To add more context. Our company's been around almost 100 years. Not claiming to be perfect, but I have a feeling we'll survive another 100 with our stingy methodology. We may be running things in a way that the current generation doesn't agree with ("not best practices" they say), but we haven't laid off groups of people since 2004. So....it is what it is.

Re: Spend your money now, says Larry!!

That's the point though. This hardware is way past 'expired', but it keeps on keeping on. We have a whole storage/IDF closet full of spare systems, all for less than 3-4K total. How much for a new Proliant 360 these days??

Supposed CPU architecture change, but doubtful.

Re: Spend your money now, says Larry!!

Eighteen years later, ours still run our core business, which is engineering hardware. We have around 28K employees to give some context. In all of the most critical functions of our infrastructure, you might even find an Ultra10.

Re: Why?

That's always been Sun's curse though ey? Too high quality, and no reason to update what works as a customer. These machines run forever, and when they do break, I get a stack of 10 year old machines off Ebay for less than 500 bucks.

Re: Why?

Oddly enough (or not), for certain targeted workloads, stuff (NFS ops, some crypto ops, etc.) on old Solaris machines is *still* 2-3x faster than on x86, that's both in Linux and Solaris/x86. Currently testing Solaris and Linux for a living, on machines ranging from 3-12 years old. I am guessing, this is mostly because nobody's actually cared to look that closely at some of the code from a perf standpoint. "It's good and fast enough".

SAP S/4HANA rollout at Queensland Health went so well that hospitals bent over backwards to avoid using it

doesn't sound too bad

Considering less than 2 years ago HANA running on Linux would still routinely corrupt its databases during exit. Good stuff.

Meet the ‘DPU’ – accelerated network cards designed to go where CPUs and GPUs are too valuable to waste

interesting

All of the real life DPUs I've seen used in the marginal-workload/start-up storage world, require a proprietary interconnect or other out of band 'network' (usually 100% blackbox with no admin/user visibility). With this, the value proposition quickly diminishes. Interesting that there's no mention of this in many of the cheerleading articles on the topic.

Tesla to build cars made of batteries and hit $25k price tag about three years down the road

Re: Applefying the car

I always find these types of aesthetic-based comments oddly short-sighted. I don't look at my car. I drive it. There's not a whole lot more to it.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... but not your H-1B geeks, L-1 staffers nor J-1 students

Re: H-1B visas [*] Silicon Valley to fill engineering departments with top intl talent

Apartments are for the H1B's in the fancy FAANGs I think? At the fairly large corp I spent most of my career (about 28K employees worldwide), they *literally* bought a hotel (ex-Comfort Suites) right in the same business park as their global HQ, with a company-owned shuttle to bus them back and forth. Multiple people per hotel room. As an immigrant, and one that started life in the US helping my parents clean these same office buildings late at night (I was 9 years old, guess who 99% of the people still working at the office at 9PM were?) while they hustled to make their 3rd or 4th job on time, I find the H1B program highly disturbing.

Re: L-1

But surely you realize that college enrollment in the US is down significantly each year for the last 9 (mostly due to inflated tuition costs)?

I'm glad those elite enough to afford a masters graduate in engineering are getting *something* after investing 250K+.

Ardour goes harder: v6.0 brings 'huge engineering changes' to open-source digital audio workstation

Dude, if you were dragging in an mp3 for reference while doing audio engineering work, then you've been doing it wrong for 15 years. Some of us in this space can actually tell you which specific AD/DAs or pre-amps were used in a specific recording or instrument by hearing the final master. I suppose it all boils down to what kind of sound you're working with, but I have *yet* to meet an audio engineer or technician that would prefer to use lossy formats or one that would export a master in mp3 format. For what its worth, I cut records on the side with a decent lathe, and would *never* and will *never* accept mp3 masters from someone if we're talking about music production and replication. There is too much to lose in the process.

HPE's Black Thursday: Staff face pay cuts or the ax, office closures to save $1bn+ after coronavirus slams IT titan

Re: "products will be streamlined and rejigged to be offered as-a-service"

...and more importantly...hasn't HP/HPE tried this already with Hyperion (or whatever it was called), and failed miserably, after their cloud being owned half-to-death lost all credibility?

AT&T slapped down for its '5GE' ads: You don’t have a proper 5G network, so stop saying so, says watchdog

Speaking as someone who worked for years in this world (on handset engineering side) - because carriers have all manufacturers by the balls, they know it, and they don't mind showing it. Some of the most disgusting and non-professional behavior I've seen in my 20 year professional career, has been middle and upper managers at Verizon and AT&T.

Vodafone chief speaks out after 5G conspiracy nuts torch phone mast serving Nightingale Hospital in Brum

...and electrocuted them in the name of science!! Brilliant!

California emits latest layoff statistics. March's numbers are ugly. It's 19,000 total, including many in tech

queue...

Queue these same companies publicly decrying the shortage of skilled potential employees, and continuing to lobby for loosening of the H1B restrictions and increase in quotas.

HPE fixes another SAS SSD death bug: This time, drives will conk out after 40,000 hours of operation

Seems to be the case with my old EMC array, but all of my Nimble arrays have non-sequential serial #s and diff vendors across built-in shelf and expansion. Choose your vendor wisely.

OpenBSD bugs, Microsoft's bad update, a new Nork hacking crew, and more

Re: OpenBSD a little too true to its name?

...well, yes, but apparently only under a specific contrived configuration. :-)

Welcome to cultured meat – not pigs reading Proust but a viable alternative to slaughter

"Also, if the vat-grown products contain the same nutrients in approximately equal amounts to real meat, do you think your body can tell?"

Hmmm, yes? Do you believe the food you eat is only made up of chemicals and nutrients that we know about currently? We're not even positive about what proteins are and what most do.

"Eating vegetables vs eating meat is huge reduction in land use, energy expenditure, water use... any environmental measure you can throw at it, in fact, once you account for the agriculture required to feed the animals."

Hmmm. Perhaps when you're considering production as it currently is practiced in the US, vs. lets say, a village in Eastern Europe 30 years ago (or US in the 20's, 30s). You don't *need* all that agriculture to feed the animals. They were feeding themselves just fine without humans being involved. I raise both 100% of my meat, and 60% of our vegetables (family of 4). There's no way in hell we could ever raise *all* of our food if it was in vegetative form only - we wouldn't have the water for that (most of the wells in farming-country where I live have dried up...largely from growing plants)...not sure what we would do in the winter time either as far as attempting to grow. It takes a *vastly* less amount of land to feed goats and pigs for free, than it would for us to try to produce as much in vegetables pound-for-pound at a great environmental and labor cost. Not to mention the nutritional trade-off you make when eating only vegetables (especially if you're only eating "normal" vegetables as you would find in your local grocery store, instead of all of the random grasses, herbs and weeds we *should* be *still* eating) . Plant protein != animal protein. Short protein != long protein.

Re: You could say that of anything factory processed.

I call bullshit. Home cooking worse offender than mass produced "food"? Do you have data?