Posts by talk_is_cheap

Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

Re: But will the companies that benefit put back in ?

I guess you have no idea who Nextcloud is, how long they have been around or who was involved in its formation.

Apple exec sends Google shares plunging as he calls AI the new search

So another person who does not understand the engines that marketing people call AI.

AI is not the 'new search' as it does not record everything it discovers at the time it is found. The core data set of an AI system is a highly refined subset of a snapshot of data that was made before the training process was started.

He seems to think that an AI system can, in real time, learn the internet and stay up to date as changes are found. AI systems learn real time information by filling their very limited context window during an interaction with an end client, often by calling out to things like search engines.

Toyota picks Huawei’s Android-killer HarmonyOS for its Chinese electric sedan

Odd title

"Toyota picks Huawei’s Android-killer HarmonyOS for its Chinese electric sedan".

HarmonyOS on phones is reportedly built on Android 10, while larger target devices may just use linux as the foundation OS. Not really an Android-killer if it's just an out-of-date version of a mainstream OS.

VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor in an utterly obscure way

WOW, a free version of ESXi, shame about the lack of licenses available via VMUG membership or any sane small business Essentials licenses.

Broadcom gifted whole market segments to other players and does not want to fight to get them back.

Mapping legend Ordnance Survey releases blocky Britain in Minecraft – again

Re: Meanwhile, Ordnance Survey...

But the OS is not a tax‑funded map agency. It is a government-owned profit center that happens to make maps. If you expect that to change, you need to fight parliament.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

In 1991 I was purchasing 32MB modules for Compaq servers at just £11,000 a module as they were made by Kingston rather than Compaq. At one point I had 7 of them sitting on my desk.

In 1996 I was purchasing 32MB modules for HP Servers at £800 a module.

Today I just install 32GB modules without caring into any desktop that is short on memory and use hosted servers with 256GB+.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Bonkers

The UK does not have free speech rights, it has protected freedom of expression for certain things, and oddly easy access to porn is not on the list.

'Savvy' shortcuts produce near-instant speech-to-speech translation of 36 languages

Because the encryption takes place at the end device, Meta would have to insert the largest backdoor known to man to access the communications at the end device, which would get noticed rather quickly.

Euro-cloud Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform

Re: Will this make Broadcomm think again?

Their share price is linked to the AI bubble, not the VMware sideshow.

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

A race to nowhere

All this work to get to the point of a real AI that can say no to the type of destructive questions that humans ask.

Australia moves to drop some cryptography by 2030 – before quantum carves it up

Re: What an enigma

Enigma was not 'cracked', instead the British were able to exploit major weaknesses within its use at a scale that no one at the time considered possible.

The weaknesses were first spotted by Polish cryptographers who passed their work on to the British.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

People are missing EUI-64

With IPv6, it is common to use the Extended Unique Identifier (RFC2373) solution to provide a unique local address for a network device. This is a unique 64-bit value often created by expanding the 48-bit Mac Address to 64 bits.

The result is that every subnet becomes rather large but things like DHCP or manual address assignment can be dropped from the system design, which at scale for grand IoT networks is key.

So, for the old hands here, the IPv6 address starts to look very much like the old Novell IPX address structure, which was, in turn, based on the older Xerox IDP protocol.

Broadcom loses another big VMware customer: UK fintech cloud Beeks Group, and most of its 20,000 VMs

Re: Not that big a customer

The biggest IT battles in many of those financial services customers will be over which open-source products will be used next.

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

Re: We used to have these in the 90s

"so what's with the brouhaha", it provides a one-stop shop to keep the customer's bean counters happy.

Australia tells tots: No TikTok till you're 16... or X, Instagram and Facebook

I guess the next step will be the banning of access to proxes and VPNs.

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

Re: Sometimes, Mathematics may depend on one's point of view/training/interpretation (perhaps)...

And it is clear that none of them understand the task at hand as they all missed out 2 :)

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Re: ipv6 is a mess and ipv4 will not die anytime soon

IPv6 may still needs NAT for reasons like the one you have provided if devices can not handle a dynamic local name service, they key thing is that it does not need the service provider to roll out things like carrier-grade NAT which may be OK for phones, but is a right pain for other tasks.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

So the school rules would ban all students from using google.

So the school has not kept up with what is going on around it in the world. AI, well what we currently call AI is now a standard feature of much of the internet. Google search even answers now with an "AI Overview" as the first entry.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

> The nodes of my database clusters talk to each other using TLS. That obviously can't use a CNAME.

Why would your database cluster endpoints care what TTL browsers use for certs?

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

It has to be spaces

There is no defined 'length' for a tab as the original concept comes from manually set 'tabs' on a typewriter. So while one person's IDE may be set to 3 spaces per tab it does not mean that the same indentation will be shown across all the tools that access/process the file with the tabs included.

If you want to use the tab key, just select an IDE that can convert the tab into spaces for you.

SpaceX accuses 'meme-stock' rival of 'misinformation' over Starlink signals waiver

Re: Exemption not required

It is not so much about relevant IP, but more about the fact that the AST satellites are built to do the job, within the limitations set by the regulator.

LinkedIn started harvesting people's posts for training AI without asking for opt-in

Well the good news is

The UK also seems to be on the list of locations where the AI does not data mine as when you try and opt out it states "This setting is not available where you are located because we do not currently use your data to train generative AI models for content creation. "

Oracle brews Java 23 for just-in-time delivery

Re: Also in this release

I keep looking for a company with such a term, it would be a great way to get the family budget under control, and they would be welcome to the second born as well :)

Re: Also in this release

Any sane Java user just uses one of the other released JDKs and runtimes. Oracle's licensing is just a way to get business that do not have a clue to pay for the development of Java :)

Desktop hypervisors are like buses: None for ages, then four at once

vmrun allows you to do tasks against a VM rather than control the VMWare Workstation application/environment. So you use vmrun to create a snapshot of a VM or have it execute a command within the VM, but it does not allow you to create a new VM.

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

Re: Well...

The problem is that many systems on the internet consider HE's service as a regionless proxy so they block it, Netflex is a good example of this as they do not want customers using proxies that can get around region restrictions.

Netherlands fines Uber €290M for improper EU-US driver data transfers

For the CLOUD Act to get involved, the USA has to issue a warrant, and even that can be challenged. It provides no defence against a company shipping EU personal data to its USA server because that is just how they do things.

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

And if you are in the UK all these costs have VAT added on, using Patreon to make a payment to a small independent creator results in all the middlemen making money and the creator receiving next to nothing.

AMD claims Nvidia's Grace CPU Superchip, Arm are no match for its Epyc Zen 4 cores

They are both fast, now what problem are you trying to solve.

These system designs have to be mapped to a business problem before any choice can be made, the benchmarks just tell a designer they are nice and fast. If the business problem needs all cores to work on the same memory-based data set you are going to start looking at the Nvidia solution first as the memory I/O speed and processor interconnect are designed for just that with performance numbers beyond anything AMD or Intel can offer. On the other hand, if the problem does not need a unified memory model or needs more than 960GB of RAM the Nvidia solution may not fit so well.

Note - AMD gave Nivida an advantage in the benchmarks as the 480GB solution is reported to have a memory bandwidth of 1024GB/s, while the larger 960GB solution is listed at just 768GB/s.

Another law firm piles on Intel for Raptor Lake CPU failures as complaints grow louder

Just remember

You purchase processors from AMD and space heaters from Currys, Intel is not a market leader in either market.

Latest update for 'extremely fast' compression algorithm LZ4 sprints past old versions

Re: Parallel compression is hard

> So there must be some encoding of where one block ends and another block begins,

That is kind of how block storage devices work. On top of this the file system decides how many physical blocks it wants to combine into a logical block.

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Re: FALSE

Sun failed because its hardware business model failed.

The cost of Java was a rounding error for a company that needed to sell very costly unix-based SPARC systems. What did not help was that SUN got into the X86-based server market so 'good enough' systems from Sun reduced the sales of their 'top end' systems.

Just like all the other 'advanced' system providers of the 80's and 90's, the 2000 bubble burst and commodity servers did them in. When they did innovate with things like the cloud based utility offering it was easy for others to duplicate the offering once it was clear that there was a market using far cheaper X86/Linux solutions.

Latest MySQL release is underwhelming, say some DB experts

If you need to support a MySQL based application you install MariaDB.

If you want a feature-rich SQL server for a new project then PostgreSQL becomes a valid option depending on the skill sets you have access to.

The choice becomes harder if you are designing around the need for high-availability replication - at this point, you hire an expert for either PostgresSQL or MariaDB and forget about MySQL.

AMD predicts future AI PCs will run 30B parameter models at 100 tokens per second

Speed is everything......

When being told to eat small rocks or that wood glue makes a good pizza topping.

Elexon's Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate

You don't have to purchase certs nowadays. Even Eloxon's main website uses certs from Cloudflare as I guess they use Cloudflare as their CDN. They can then use Cloudflare certs on their own systems or choose another vendor.

The fact that the Insight web pages are using a cert from DigiCert likely means that no one in the tech team at Eloxon has upgraded their infrastructure to use Let's Encrypt certs which are also free.

Cloudflare debuts one-click nuke of web-scraping AI

If the AI client has access to 100,000's of non-sequential IP addresses then it can be well hidden as it can act as 100,000's of human speed browsers. If on the other hand, it is accessing a large number of sites quickly from a small number of IP addresses it becomes visible within the logs rather quickly. The only real challenge is to separate the AI traffic patterns from traffic patterns that would be generated by a large multi-user proxy.

>> Can I stop Cloudflare from hoovering up my data for this or any other purpose?

Don't use them as your CDN and they will then not be monitoring requests from end nodes to your servers as the traffic will not be routed over their CDN.

>> Nor is scraping the open web tantamount to theft.

Maybe you should read up on copyright laws before making such a comment.

Re: Whatever

When did you decide that it was Clodflare's job to police the web and when did you get all the governments of the world to grant it the required powers to operate such a role?

Meta warns bit flips, other hardware faults cause AI errors

Re: I'm a bit out of touch with the hardware design

It is why critical systems are often deployed as 3 logical units that process the same data and all return a result - all the results are compared and the answer selected by 2 or all 3 systems is passed to the next step.

China miffed over electric vehicle tariff tiff with EU

Well if the China's (or EU's) economy goes pop we are all 'in it together'.

Veeam adds support for VMware alternative Proxmox to its backup software

But Veeam is a solution for backing up far more than just the VMs found on a company's virtualization platform. Anyone currently looking at running to Proxmox from vSphere will also be trying to fit Proxmox into their current environment with backups being a key issue. I can't see anyone wanting to try and run 2 independent backup solutions as they try and run a long-term migration project.

VMware giving away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro free for personal use

So the gateway product is now free for learning!

After which you can try ESXi and perform your first business deployment using the entry-level cost vSphere essentials kit................

Oh, so much for that progression.

I think most people are rather busy dealing the major budget issues they have due to all the product and price changes to vSphere.

Dell customer order database of '49M records' stolen, now up for sale on dark web

List of who has what kit

So the hackers now know by address who has purchased costly Dell equipment and how old that equipment is.

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

???????

Anything you have ever posted in public space on the internet has been fair game for the authorities since the second you posted it, nothing about this bill changes that. The data collectors have been doing just that for a very long time.

Roku makes 2FA mandatory for all after nearly 600K accounts pwned

Re: Credential stuffing and password spraying

So allowing a mass denial of service attack instead.

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

The dry-up issue due to limited use of the printer is the reason why I have my HP printer on the entry-level subscription. I do 100-200 pages a year (I use the scanner a lot) and HP replaces the cartages when they are empty, all for £18 a year.

Nvidia talks up local AI with RTX 500, 1000 Ada mobile GPUs

I guess the PR team wants to push up the share price even more.

The few people I know who do anything with 'local' AI just use or remote into a very well spec'ed desktop that has the best Nvidia card that they could fund.

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

"However, for archive purposes, the tech may not have much of a lead over plain old tape technology. Last year, IBM announced the TS1170 tape drive with 50 TB cartridges, which are capable of storing up to 150 TB through 3:1 compression."

What an odd comment to make - using the same level of compression such an optical disk would store 600 TB.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

Re: ESXi Free Version was too restricted

Hosting vendors like Scaleway use it to validate their hosted offerings, customer can then bring their own vSphere licenses when they rent the host(s) they need.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

Not sure why MS wants to take the credit

MS seems to want to claim that their systems and tools are responsible for these images. I guess the alternative is for them to have to admit that there are a rather lot of open source-based 'AI' tools out there that can be run locally that do what is known as text-to-image processing.

There has been a sub-culture using these tools for some time and sadly they are getting rather good as tools and the people involved have been getting rather good at combining different tools to generate better and better output.

I guess that MS is worried that while their share price may take a hit if their AI is linked to such images, the resulting hit will be a lot larger if it becomes well-known that their AI is not linked to such images.