Posts by localzuk

Europe's cloud datacenter ambition 'completely crazy' says SAP CEO

Encrypting all data in the cloud is not entirely possible - it needs decrypting at some point to serve it up. Not every app in the world is built so encryption is end to end - doing so would be impossible for the majority of online tools.

Seagate still HAMRing away at the 100 TB disk drive decades later

HAMR

The Duke Nukem Forever of hard drive tech.

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

Re: May not repeat but it rhymes

Most of that is once again repeating the same stuff you have said before, and it still lacks a response to what I've said.

"I quote in my first paragraph of the post you responded to- "Agree with it or not the mineral deal puts US stakes in Ukraine which would make Russia less likely to attack US interests, at least directly."."

This is not a response to my point. It doesn't come close to what I'm saying. Russia couldn't give a damn about US interests in any European country. They've already engaged in sabotage against US interests across Europe.

You're focusing on Ukraine. The specific issue of Ukraine. Not the empire building that Russia is engaged in. If Ukraine is lost, via a poorly negotiated peace or a strategic defeat, Russia will not just shut down its military machine and go home. I've already said this before, and you didn't give a sensible response.

Putin has stated, multiple times, along with numerous of his closest advisers and ministers, that they want to restore Russia to its "natural borders". That isn't just Ukraine. That would be Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, etc... They're already building up their military on Finland's borders, and have increased militarisation of Kaliningrad. They are already poking Poland, utilising Belarus as a proxy.

Re: May not repeat but it rhymes

Russia is already running out of resources. They use western technology in their weapons platforms - something that is being found time and again in their remains. The west is tightening up the provision of these tools, until such a point where Russia simply won't be able to get them. They do not have an advanced semiconductor industry, as an example - their own semiconductors are generations behind.

You have consistently avoided the point. You keep going on and on about there being some way to negotiate a peace that actually ends Russia's attacks - but haven't touched on the problem of Russia doing it again. Russia has repeatedly backed out of every attempt to stop fighting. So, your entire idea of "a peace" is naïve.

Ukraine have offered an unconditional ceasefire. Putin has refused. What exactly do you think can be negotiated with someone who doesn't want to negotiate, who's negotiating team in Turkey stated on the first day of talks that they can fight forever? That every time a peace is brought up adds more requirements to how to stop the fighting?

But, then, you've revealed where you stand with your one sided pro-Russian talking points. Referring to the confiscation of Russian assets as "stealing" but haven't mentioned Russia's wholesale confiscation of western assets (all the airliners that were leased to Russian companies have been taken into ownership by Russia).

Your views are incoherent and have failed, repeatedly, to say how you think peace actually would happen when the aggressor has, for years, stated he wants to rebuild a Russian empire, and has given no real indication that they want peace.

Re: May not repeat but it rhymes

Trump doesn't have a plan. He has random, naïve and self-serving thoughts. In the middle of a war, his first thought was "how can we extract money from Ukraine?" and pushed the mineral deal. Trump's "plan" is based on Putin being an honest actor, as I stated earlier - and it simply isn't the case. Any such agreement would simply give Russia time to regroup. We already know Putin has larger goals due to his own speeches.

Your question about fighting to the last Ukrainian is predicated on a falsehood - that Ukraine can't succeed. That Russia would always come out on top. With the right provision of weapons and funding, Ukraine can sufficiently prevent attacks by Russia in the first place - hitting Russian military installations like they have been doing. The announcement that UK, France, Germany and the USA have now removed limitations on long range attacks is a good one that pushes to where I am thinking.

Russia will indeed run out of resources - there's only so long an economy can operate on a war footing like this, when modern war-fighting requires complex supply chains and resources that aren't home-grown. More and more sanctions are being applied. Eventually we'll see Russians being denied visas to enter western nations as well.

Re: May not repeat but it rhymes

So, you've answered your own question. "What do we do about it?" If we know Putin will continue, then the only thing we can do about it is push back, harder and harder. Give Ukraine more weapons. Build our own military capabilities, until such a point that an attack from Russia on any European nation, or continuing the war in Ukraine, would be pointless for them, and impossible for them to continue. Not a strategic defeat, but one that simply means they can't afford to continue. Ultimately, the end would be Russia itself deciding enough is enough and Putin and his lackies would be deposed, and saner heads would take over and try to protect their economy and people.

Its the only answer to the question. All others lead to escalation, rather than eventual de-escalation.

Re: Golden ?

What we have done to Russia? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The west had good relations with Russia. We were happily buying their fossil fuels. We were happily expanding businesses there. Then Putin decided to invade Ukraine for a spurious reason.

We have not attacked Russia. The whole reason Europe saw such turmoil recently was that we had accepted Russia as a stable partner to work with, and then go and do this!

Re: May not repeat but it rhymes

There is a giant flaw in your primary-school-level analysis... The flaw is that it is all predicated on Putin being an honest actor. Except, so far, every single thing that Putin has said? Has been a lie or a manipulation.

Let's take the most recent talks. Zelensky offered a ceasefire, Putin said he'd negotiate if Zelensky turned up. Zelensky turns up? No Putin. No ceasefire - in fact the Russian team of "negotiators" just use escalatory rhetoric. Every "compromise" Putin has proposed has been the same "surrender".

I'll pose a question to you codejunky. Baring in mind that Russia has spent the last decade building its military industrial complex to the level that the entire country is basically just a big weapons factory now, let's say Ukraine agrees to Putin's maximalist demands, and the war "ends". What do you think happens next? Russia shuts down all its military growth? Goes home? Becomes a friendly nation to the West overnight, and gives up its imperialistic ambitions?

Remember Ukraine isn't the first country it has attacked in this campaign of imperialism. Also, remember the big issue Putin claims is that NATO shouldn't be on the Russian border - which it is already. Finally take into account some of Putin's long rambling speeches over the last 15 years - where he decries the fall of the Russian Empire, and the fall of the Soviet Union...

Do you really think it would all just be over when Ukraine stopped fighting?

Greater Manchester says its NHS analytics stack is years ahead of Palantir wares

Re: Wait...

Its difficult to agree with your statement that "The NHS makes appalling IT / systems decisions" because, while the NHS is a title, it isn't a single body - its hundreds of different organisations, and then a central govt department that makes its own decisions as well.

Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt

What exactly is the point of AI?

In its current form, what is the point of it?

Every task I've seen it used for on a larger scale ends up needing more humans to fix its output than would've been needed to generate the correct output manually in the first place.

Great, your "AI" can generate 10,000 lines of code from a prompt. But it took you weeks to write the prompt in such a way that the AI could understand it, and then you have to spend more weeks checking the code actually does what its supposed to, and fixing the prompt to correct any errors.

The only usages I've seen for such tools so far, that actually work, are "what does this code do?" where you feed in someone's spaghetti code and it summarises it. And "convert this overly complicated PHP code for adding data to a database into simple SQL".

Everything else I've tried? Its hallucinated stuff, spat out incorrect code, etc...

Microsoft winnows: Layoffs hit software engineers hard

Incompetent leadership

Microsoft are a massively profitable company. They are sacking talented people because, why? To move some numbers around on a spreadsheet to make investors happy.

Actual competent leadership would see the talent they have and utilise it to grow the company. It cost them a fortune to hire, train and grow those people, and now they'll go and use those skills with their competitors.

This cycle of hiring and layoffs is a symptom of, frankly, idiots in the C suite.

Microsoft facing multibillion legal claim over how it sells software

Re: Insidious

Seems a lot of what you described there was basically "change shock". So, inadequate training for new stuff. If you swap something out blind, of course people will get upset.

But anyway, none of that counters what I said really.

Re: Dominance?

Why do you narrow it down to "desktops"? There is so much overlap with device types and usage now. People do their jobs using tablets, and use office software on those. On laptops, desktops, remote desktop in a browser etc... The numbers are from statcounter for OS share. Office suite numbers from 6Sense. Other stat services have different percentages but none of them give Microsoft Office a dominating lead. All of them give Google a majority of the market.

OS market share covers basically any user device, not just traditional desktop PCs - as the world doesn't utilise just desktop PCs. Eg. I just had a meeting and the rep didn't use a laptop at all, they did their work via their phone, taking notes etc...

Re: Insidious

The alternative is simple - use one of the alternative products on the market. There are a multitude of OS's now.

Buy a Chromebook. Where you have to have a Google login for each user...

Or buy a Mac.

Or buy a PC and put Linux on it.

Or buy a laptop with HarmonyOS on it.

Or buy an Android device and plug it into a monitor.

Or buy an iPad.

Microsoft are no longer a monopoly, so realistically, they can make the choice how their software works.

Dominance?

I'm not sure this will get anywhere now. Microsoft no longer have a monopoly in either the OS or Office space. Their market share in the OS space is about 25% - if you try to narrow it down to a more device specific OS, then it becomes a bit difficult to define due to overlap between devices and OS usage. Office software? Microsoft has only around 10% of the market now, with Google Workspace being the dominant player at almost 80% of the market.

So, I'm not sure you can claim Microsoft have a dominant position in either. And I'm also not sure a third party license reseller should be able to dictate how a company licenses its products.

CISA slammed for role in 'censorship industrial complex' as budget faces possible $500M cut

Re: Dumb

On the whole, propaganda works because people don't want to think critically. To say we should just educate ignores basic human behaviour. Religion exists and dominates the world for this very reason.

Re: Dumb

Yes. We all actually do need some censorship. Remember that old phrase, a lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes". We need people preventing the spread of lies disrupting the democratic institutions of our societies.

Re: Dumb

How do you know they're bad people? There's been no due process for a lot of them. Just an accusation by government agents, then off they go on a plane to a camp.

What's stopping those same agents from targeting the people they don't like? If you don't see the problem with this then that's a huge problem.

Not to mention "a few mistakes" - there should not be any mistakes with this stuff!

Would you like to be one of those "mistakes"?

Re: Misinformation and Propaganda

The fun thing with eliminating the people in govt tasked with dealing with misinformation? More misinformation can be spread about Trump and his merry band of idiots. Nice double-edged sword.

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

I'd say volume of explosions was considerably larger with town gas. Town Gas Explosions in Dwellings, by J.F.Fry, 1970, detailed that there was an average frequency of 84 household explosions per year in the UK between 1957 and 1968, vs 31 per year according to the Gas Safe Register (reported in The Guardian, July 2022).

There were 14.8m homes in the UK in 1960, there are 29.9 million now. 5.68 explosions per million, vs 1.036 explosions per million, a drop of more than 80%.

Yes, there were a *lot* of leaks. Figures I've read were that the percentage lost was up to 20% vs below 1% for natural gas.

But also, town gas was not just hydrogen was it? It was a mix of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane - which are heavier than hydrogen alone.

There's multiple problems with your idea.

But, the biggest one is that hydrogen is not a simple gas to work with. Leaks are extremely easy to get in any system that uses hydrogen. It *loves* to escape.

As annoying as lithium fires are, hydrogen based vehicles would have considerably higher numbers of fires due to the nature of the gas and just how flammable it is. We worry about petrol vapor being flammable, with rules about open flames etc at petrol stations, but when you look at the numbers, hydrogen only needs 0.02 millijoules of energy to ignite, vs 0.24 millijoules for petrol vapour. It also forms flammable mixtures more easily.

What corruption? There has been absolutely none shown. If there had been, why hasn't there been arrests and trials? Money being spent on things you don't like is not corruption.

Re: Just another Trump lie

You know there's lots of evidence from the time, right? That rewriting history doesn't actually work in the 24/7 connected world we have today?

Re: Just another Trump lie

NYPD records confirmed he is 5'10 and 287 lbs. Or was when they had hold of him.

So, if you've got that solar and wind... why not use the electricity directly instead? Rather than wasting it by converting it into other forms of stored energy, with losses?

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

Yes, they existed. I installed a Promethean 84" screen back then in a school hall. It was considerably cheaper than the Microsoft version. I remember discussions at the time in school groups asking why we'd choose a Surface device over the normal Promethean or SMART tech.

White House budget proposal could beam NASA science back decades

Where's the profit for Musk?

That's the question that'll be getting asked for every science program at the moment it seems. A telescope? That won't help Musk become richer...

Staff at UK's massive health service still have interoperability issues with electronic records

Re: Brownfield

No no no, that's what the disastrous project back in the early 00's aimed for. The "one ring to rule them all" of IT solutions. A total disaster.

Specifying proper standards, for functionality and interoperability? That is the correct direction. But, it requires those standards to actually be built properly, and then companies who develop the tools to implement them properly.

UK government told to get a grip on £23B tech spend

Too big

I think one of the biggest issues with government IT procurement is that they keep launching these mega-projects, that do all things to all people. Like the multiple failed NHS digitisation projects of the past.

It leads to their only being a small handful of companies that can service it - the usual bunch Civica, Serco, Capita etc... And they are not known for doing things at a "cost effective" rate.

These mega-projects end up doomed to fail as the requirements keep changing and they never manage to be finished.

Trump yanks CHIPS Act cash unless tech giants pony up more of their own dough

Re: Meh

At this point, with the rapid expansion of Chinese military capabilities, I suspect we'll see a Chinese invasion of Taiwan within 10 years. So, those long term costs will be moot at that point.

Re: Meh

You don't seem to understand the issue. At the moment, most (90% of the world's supply) of advanced semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan. If China invades, or even just blockades the island with its, now enormous, navy, the USA is cut off.

It takes years, if not a decade to build fabrication plants.

Making it "easier and better to do business" with the US would mean absolutely nothing at all as there's no-one who could step in and fill that gap. This means the US govt loses access to components needed for its entire military estate, and the US economy loses access to all the parts needed for modern technology. The US economy would effectively collapse.

So, in essence, the USA can't afford not to build out the fabrication capabilities in their own country.

Re: Meh

For strategic industries, yes, they get built out at "any cost". When your country could risk serious damage by a third party country producing all of something you need, you spend whatever you need to facilitate bringing that home.

Steel, oil, rubber, ball bearings - these were the strategic industries of WW2. Now? Its semiconductors, AI, lithium, batteries and rare earth metals on top of those.

If war breaks out, and you don't have a stable set of strategic industries running? You are immediately at a disadvantage and are facing attrition from day 1.

UK threatens £100K-a-day fines under new cyber bill

Re: So what *is* the answer?

Point 1 is already the case, officially. GDPR and "UK GDPR" both require companies to only store and process the minimum amount of data needed for their task. However, the way companies can justify the tasks is somewhat lax...

The counter-argument for point 2 is that without "limited liability", people won't invest and start businesses, as they end up with too much risk. But there surely must be a balance somewhere in between.

Point 3? Impossible. That'd require government contracts to be written in a way that is advantageous to the customer, and they never are.

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

Cutting corners

So, ultimately, the telecoms companies cut corners by not upgrading their network properly. You can add all the other stuff in, but to an end user? We were told 5G would be much faster and it isn't because the companies couldn't be bothered to upgrade the RAN. So, why exactly would anyone pay extra for something that doesn't actually exist?

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

I think this misunderstands the purpose of a lot of federal government spending over the years. When a company looks to do something, they generally target their spending to get the best deal.

When the US federal government looks to do something, the spending has to be approved by Congress, which means representatives of every state asks "what will this spending do for my state?". So, to get things approved, extras are added in, or non-optimal supply chains are chosen simply to get it across the line.

The problem isn't the spending, or the actual administration - it is Congress consistently failing to act in the interests of the USA, but instead in the interests only of their state.

Look at SLS - it was basically chosen to provide funding to ULA, Boeing and Northrup to keep them ticking over.

There is an element of strategy to it as well - some spending on pointless things is actually strategically useful, as it keeps workforces skilled and available for when things are actually needed, so they can be built at home in the USA. The UK fails at this regularly, allowing important industries to die off and then get confused when they can't find anyone to build things in the UK as there's no companies that do it any more.

Quango or directly in a department, the work ends up still needing to be done. Every government adjusts how things are done, but it often is just a case of musical chairs.

The simple reality is, running a country is expensive.

Everyone praising contracts being cancelled in the USA are usually doing so because the things being cancelled don't affect them directly. Its the "well, my house hasn't burned down, why do I pay for fire services?" argument. Its short sighted and ignores the entire concept of society and joint responsibility.

You can't have only the benefits of being in a society and none of the negatives.

Focusing on the UK - do you really think that the UK government is still overspending on administration? After nearly 2 decades of governments cutting department funding over and over again? Really?

Capita's Northern Ireland school IT deal swells to over half a billion after Fujitsu exit

Re: Education authority still searching for an alternative after 13 years

This sort of thinking is basically "rose tinted glasses". The reason we have high safeguarding requirements now is due to historic abuse issues. Burying your head in the sand and saying "we survived" is a classic case of survivorship bias.

Tech allows schools to operate much more efficiently than they used to, as there are higher expectations of schools today than there used to be. Parents want to be kept more updated about how things go day to day.

Before we used tech for everything, some things didn't work.

Slightly misleading

The contract covers full end to end provision of IT to schools. So, that figure would include everything from end user devices to the network switches, cabling, technicians, internet connectivity, etc...

So, £754m over the 15 year length of the service, that's about £50m a year, or about £143 per pupil per year. Looking at my own school, it wouldn't be unreasonable to pay that much.

Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options, says Dutch parliament

Re: a country with nearly 18 million people

There are limits to the value of scaling. At some point, scaling further adds more complexity (eg. adding extra data-centres, adding global reach, adding more and more services etc...), and increased costs. At another, scaling further adds nothing except linear increases in costs as you're just adding hardware.

I think at this point, EU countries have realised that these industries are entering the realms of "strategic importance" so I suspect if someone tried to buy out an EU based cloud hosting company now? Governments would start stepping in to stop it.

Are you saying a country with nearly 18 million people couldn't run a cloud hosting platform? Or develop a productivity suite?

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Don't forget that they usually then say that it isn't something they can deal with, as the request has come through to $RandomDepartment unrelated to where you reported it, only for them to then pass it to a different, wrong, department. Repeat at least 3 times, until it circles back round to the original department. Each transfer taking 2 days to get a response from. Then eventually them saying it isn't a problem, its intended, and closing it without actually helping you.

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

Re: This place is getting worse than slashdot for uninformed comments...

You know the federal government employs people in offices in basically every city in the USA right? So, there are people who are affected in every district, meaning the venue is perfectly fine.

Federal employees are not subject to at will employment - that's the whole basis of this case. The government broke the law in how they terminated their employment.

Me? I'll listen to a federal judge who understands the law over a random commenter repeating nonsense.

The President does not outrank the judges - they are co-equal branches of government. A ruling in a federal court has as much power as an order from the President. When they clash, they work their way up the courts until the Supreme Court, where they can limit the actions of the President.

The idea that the President has some sort of supremacy and that courts should not be able to stop their illegal actions is absurd.

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Enforcing copyright is a global issue

If one country stops doing it, other countries follow suit and the conventions that protect internationally produced works fall apart.

So, the end result is that those movies? That software? Those books? Produced in the USA? Why would other countries respect their copyrights if the USA won't respect the copyright of the works made elsewhere?

The USA makes hundreds of billions of dollars a year off the creative industries. Ignoring copyright in this manner risks ruining these industries in favour of a snake oil salesman.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Re: Needed?

The US has a debt based economy. That debt is the money supply for the country.

Look at it like this. When someone goes to a bank and ask for a loan, the bank doesn't go into a vault and grab the money from a pile. Most banks do not have enough deposits to cover every loan they issue. The person who takes the loan promises to pay it back. It is money creation.

Sovereign debt is similar, it is a promise to pay it back. But it didn't exist in the first place. So, that debt is the creation of money. Without debt, you have no economy.

Re: Cancelling contracts?

The problem with law is that unless someone challenges it, they have authority based on them simply saying they do. Unless Congress actually enforces their role in running the country, there's nothing to stop Trump and his minions doing whatever they want.

Especially within the context of the current legal world - both houses being Republican (read Trump) run, the Supreme Court being full of Trumpists, Trump having control of the DoJ, and the Supreme Court saying that the president can't be prosecuted for acts done as part of the job.

Ultimately, its a structural issue with the governance of the USA.

Cancelling contracts?

If I go and cancel a contract mid-term, I get charged, in most cases, the cost of the contract until its planned end date. Do American government contracts not have this in place for third party contractors?

I suspect a lot of these savings are not actually savings, with penalty clauses being enforced later when lawsuits hit.

Google's Chrome divorce still on the cards as Trump's DoJ plays hardball

Re: ELI5

You're buying the users, and the platform for advertising. So, lots of companies would be interested.

I suspect someone like X would be very interested... X Browser here we come.

Re: Is Google actually anti-competitive with Chrome?

Its not so much about Chrome being a monopoly but rather the advertising market that they're utilising Chrome and other anti-competitive practices to keep.