* Posts by hoola

2345 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2013

Northern Ireland government confirms it did not ask Fujitsu to continue bidding for project

hoola Silver badge

Re: Preferred bidder

Not as easy as that. The way the procurement process works if the Fujitsu response was good they cannot block it. All that will happen is Fujitsu sue.

Now if the government had any balls it woukd have black listed Fujitsu.

Job done.

Now it is too late.

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

hoola Silver badge

Re: Too late.

I think the interesting difference between the two technologies - Nuclear and AI is that the first was about political power and the second is about money.

That both are a form of control through completely different starting points. Where AI comes in the push is by a very limited number of huge corporations in a battle for control of data. The care little for the integrity of that data, where it came from or what use the system is put to.

Nuclear was very clear - at the outset it was a weapon. Since it's first use there has been a mutual agreement (in the loosest) or terms between the holders of nuclear weapons so they have not been used. The more recent addition of countries with less stable political systems (although that has been broke with the Orange One more recently) is wobbling the balance.

What I think is the most worrying outcome is once AI starts being used be the military to assist or replace humans in the decision making processes. People have joked on here about the Terminator scenarios and whilst the content of the films is fiction there are significant elements that are true.

The fundamental one being that if there is no human to intervene very quickly when things go off the rails intense escalation is the likely outcome.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

hoola Silver badge

From an application perspective you are right. Where the fun and games start is in unstructured file access. Whatever people might think of Windows NTFS permissions are actually very good and if correctly designed at the top of fileshares prevent the awful mess of permissions being modified down the tree.

If one goes back in time actually Novell NSS when integrated with eDirectory was better. The Linux filsystems don't really compare when it comes to permissions at scale. You can bodge with Samba integration but guess what, where does that lead you?

Now take OneDrive that from where I sit I see many of my customers using to replace the traditional home folder? That is simply a 1TB block hole conveniently accessible from Explorer, the web or an application. People also have this misconception that using OneDrive (or any cloud file service) somehow magically backs up your data.

Then we have the abomination of SharePoint/Teams - a bottomless pit of despair with all sorts of stuff put in, obscure ways to find it and a search tool that is useless (well every implementation I have come across is).

Moving forward so much data is being pushed from file servers into SharePoint and Teams then people are surprised when there are issues. Then we have the "Azure FileShare", something whose use case still defeats me as having any benefits. The Achilles heal of so many cloud/online products? The have no concept of gold snapshots so that you can backup open/locked files and get a consistent recovery point.

hoola Silver badge

Hmm, if you are in IT then this is a very large part of the problem and why so much fails.

Too many times IT Management believe they know best, or more often highly skilled techies believe they know best and influence IT Management to go with that route as policy.

All too often nobody even bothers to listen to or make the slightest attempt to engage with departments and users.

The end result - a shambolic mess with huge resistance to do anything. The IT team then blame everyone but themselves for the failing. Whilst suppliers and so an can also cause issues the number one failure point that I see is IT believing they know best and not engaging.

There are certain things that IT has to lead on when it comes to security however if the relationship is already poor then it is an uphill struggle.

This is nothing related to any vendor - it is a fundamental issue I have seen over 25 years of working in IT.

hoola Silver badge

Re: how to do it in half a dozen mouse clicks

What you see is what you might get.....

hoola Silver badge

Re: how to do it in half a dozen mouse clicks

Nope - seen exactly the same, hundreds of row each with a manual calculation.

Unless of course it has been copied from somewhere else and then pasted as values only. Given the people I was working with at the time I don't think this was the case.......

The trendline doesn’t look good for hard disk drives

hoola Silver badge

SSDs do in physical terms. It is in data and electronic terms they don't. This is mainly down to the way they fail.

UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

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Re: Put another way

If it is payroll or similar corporate function it is not the problem. It is easily managed.

It is everyone else.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Put another way

Where I used to work on all university provided equipment it was removed. Unfortunately there is no control over anything that is not.

Having seen the lengths some students will go to trying to circumvent something or the rank stupidity in behaviour the risk is too high.

hoola Silver badge

Please do explain how when there are outsourced student and guest WiFI networks and everyone has a phone with data?

hoola Silver badge

Money will win, it is all about risk. It will take very confident and brave heads to do that.

hoola Silver badge

Can you really see Oracle taking that up?

Whilst the concept is worthy why would Oracle risk losing millions?

Peep show: 40K IoT cameras worldwide stream secrets to anyone with a browser

hoola Silver badge

Re: "It should be obvious to everyone that leaving a camera exposed on the internet is a bad idea"

I supposed it depends if you are accessing the IP address and the router has not gone and allowed holes to be drilled through from the outside to support said camera,

Given that "simplicity" but setting something up with a button press appears to outweigh any security concerns is a large part of the mess we are in,

hoola Silver badge

Re: I was doing this over 20 years ago...

I think that the point that is being overlooked is that it is very little to do with them being Chinese (almost all the IoT stuff is made there anyway) but that people & companies persist in connecting all sorts of stuff to Internet connected networks without a thought.

It is not that long ago that routers started having randomised initial passwords. Then we have the stupidity that huge numbers of people appear to want all these Apps to control shite from their phone,

We are reached the point quite a few years ago where it has become pretty much impossible to protect people from the number one threat - themselves!

This applies to companies as well.

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

hoola Silver badge

To put some perspective on this the Cloud Providers already have silos for US government contracts........

Why, data segregation and security.

Why the hell have we got into a situation where it appears most other countries are happy to host all the national ICT in is foreign cloud?

My suggested answers:

Cloud Kool-aid salesmen and nice bungs with trips to the US (and elsewhere)

Too many people with no understanding of what they are doing

Rank stupidity at Government (any government) levels.

On the first I know the director of IT at the organisation I worked for got a trip out to "see how it worked"........

hoola Silver badge

Yes and no - what you are talking about is unstructured data.

The real information is held in structured form such as databases. There is only so much you can encrypt and one suspects that in the event of a demand from the NSA (US Government) the options for the end customer will be:

Any data that is accessible will have sucked out already

Consent to the data being handed over

Don't consent and lose all your data because you have breached some T&Cs and have your contract terminated.

With any cloud service getting the data in is the easy bit. Getting it back is rather more complicated, time consuming and costly. The chances are in this situation that you will simply not get it back and go out of business.

hoola Silver badge

The money and his bonus/salary/stock options come first.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Give them your keys?

I think what he is worried about is being forced to use an EU service in place of AWS and it costs more.......

hoola Silver badge

Re: Give them your keys?

The big wins at the start were:

Microsoft already had billions of $ sat in the bank

Amazon was the darling of the US Venture Capital mob who threw millions at them to get billions back in inflated stock valuations.

The likes of Google & Oracle then played catch-up but both had billions ot $ in the bank.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Give them your keys?

Exactly, most of those who are critical are only seeing this in financial terms, not data security, infrastructure dependencies and political environment.

It is blatantly obvious it will cost more to start with - in that case then the EU needs to do what it does best - throw subsidies at the solution.

If it can’t double our money, we’re not building it, Intel Products chief says

hoola Silver badge

Re: Thus strongly encouraging poor predictions

Given they have just been let off the hook for criminal prosecution and the fine as part of the deal is lost in the noise I think those accountants have does rather well.

That the company is in a mess with the production is a different matter. The killer is going to be when COMAC are certified in Europe all bets are off. Airlines like Ryanair are not going to wait when there is a cheaper product (= more profit) for the majority of their routes. Airbus will take a hit as well but probably not as big.

Datacenters have a public image problem, industry confesses to The Reg

hoola Silver badge

And importantly the 1000s of jobs that they allegedly create are only during construction, not operation.

Just like these huge distribution parks, the jobs are based on some arbitrary government figure that that huge developers like Panattoni have managed to get accepted. It is something like 1 job per 100 square meters. Utter bollocks, that is a 10m x 10m square.

Meta just saved an Illinois nuclear plant that was set to be mothballed

hoola Silver badge

One suspects that he wants all the cost savings (financial offsetting and still screwing government subsidies) of having "His" power station whilst at the same time all the benefits of the grid when it goes offline.

As long as the safety remain firmly with the appropriate authorities with out any Zuck interference it should be okay.

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

hoola Silver badge

Re: Landfill

Most will end up being shredded for the bits of valuable metal and then buried or burnt in places like Africa.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

hoola Silver badge

With ACC it will slow down sensibly when there is a change of limit. This issues occur when it is mis-detecting. Then the reduction in speed is essentially emergency braking.

The first is fine and you are correct, the second is not fine and the car that brakes for no reason is the cause.

hoola Silver badge

Actually it is not. If your car effectively "Emergency Brakes" in the middle of a motorway (or any other high speed road) for no reason then this is called "Check Braking".

If you are doing 70mph and then it decides there is a new 30mph due to a a road above the speed reduction is very aggressive.

If the car that hits you has a dashcam and the distance is reasonable you will have a very hard time proving that it is not your fault.

Sudden braking for no reason is as much a part of the fault of the person in front as it is the person behind.

I know this from personal experience and got stopped by an unmarked traffic car, breath test, searches, the lot.

They made it absolutely clear that this is part of "due care and attention".

hoola Silver badge

The recent VWs also use satnav information for speed limits.

The outcome is that you can be driving at 60 or 70 and for some insane reason it decides the 30 or 40 on a road that crosses your rout is the correct speed limit.

You really have to be aware because it will cheerfully slow up quite quickly. If the car behind hits you then the fault is yours. Braking for no reason "check braking".

If the person behind has a dashcam then there is no dispute.

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

hoola Silver badge

Re: Just for the record. . .

Twaddle, there millions of people making content that companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google have been stealing for years and now they just want to hoover everything up for their benefit.

The people you mention gave spent their lives creating content. Equally many others you haven't heard of also do the sane

US to deny visas to foreign officials it says 'censor' social media

hoola Silver badge

Re: Countries that censor social media, hmmm...

I suspect the EU is the main thorn in his side. This side of the pond there is more focus on the individual's privacy, data handling and attempts at bringing those who try to ignore this to account.

Although the wheels can turn slowly they have been effective in hitting US tech with fines that are large enough to make them blink.

Still not large enough but that is another matter.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

hoola Silver badge

Re: Feature Creep

How can we use all that data we have benn collecting and all the content users create to make money?

hoola Silver badge

Re: At least Notepad++ is still available

Whilst agreeing we are pushing to use Linux more for our product. All well and good but the wheels fall off with monotonous regularity when Windows centric customers have to:

Expand disks with LVM

Troubleshoot snap issues on LVM

View logs (simple you cry, but no) we have an excellent tool in Windows for viewing logs with no Linux equivalen (core install with minimal extras recommended good reason).

Basic connection checks to specific ports, more often than not nc or similar is not installed.

Updates, these get overlooked as there is no real management solution.

Updates breaking stuff because of an obscure dependency. This is something that rarely happens now on Windows.

hoola Silver badge

Re: It makes me happy

Not saying this is the best option but it is possible to update to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.

Based on my testing 2 cores and 4GB ram is the cut off. BIOS boot will work. You appear to need about 15GB of free space otherwise it will have a paddy.

Currently it still gets updated so if the status quo continues it is better than Windows 10 getter progressively further out of date.

Tips:

Use the Media Creation Tool on the actual OS you are updating and select this computers regional settings.

Use Rufus to create new media and select the options you want to make it install.

Run the setup from the USB key Rufus created. This is inside Windows. Not booted from the key. After a lot of frustration on languages this has worked pretty well.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Smells of desperation

The implication here is that it is on by default. One can disable it.

That is the big problem, assumed consent is now how all these companies operate. Legislation, legal cases and fines are too late, the have already hoovered up so much stuff without consent (or straightforward theft) that it is meaningless.

Irish privacy watchdog OKs Meta to train AI on EU folks' posts

hoola Silver badge

You cannot even just opt out. You have to apply with reasons, complete and utter scumbags.

The is no option on WhatsApp at all.

And forgot all this end to end encryption crap, on the device where you are reading it the text is decrypted so the tossers can scrape it.

hoola Silver badge

Re: EU?

Yes and no, there is so much of the US tech industry in Eire that it is the EU by proxy.

Where is the EU in all this?

They could be taking this on nit just letting the Irish government continue to bow down to US tech.

Signal shuts the blinds on Microsoft Recall with the power of DRM

hoola Silver badge

Re: Delete Recall

However much ElReg readers dislike Windows the option to "Not use Windows" does not exist for most corporate customers.

There is a huge difference between what an individual, tech aware user or can do and most consumers/corporate users.

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

hoola Silver badge

I think you misunderstood the article. Just because "something is out there" does not mean it is free to be used others.

Let's put some context on this, you create some material, say technical text and earn your living g frome selling it. It is in copyright and may have licenseing associated with the contents.

Someone comes along and sucks the pdf up then gives it away.

You now don't have any money!

Trump's wind farm funding freeze is so much hot air, say states as they blow sueball to Washington

hoola Silver badge

Amazon

In the UK there are currently adverts on the radio proclaiming that Amazon are the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy......

What it does not state is if they are also the largest corporate user of energy and what they do when that renewable energy is not available. It is greenwashing at it's finest.

Palantir loves the smell of DOGE budget cuts in the morning

hoola Silver badge

It would also be a very good thing if countries outside of the US that are bought into Palantir dumped it....

Yes I am looking at the UK, NHS England and the data grab that is scraping ALL patient data without consent and sending it to the US.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

hoola Silver badge

Re: Morons Are Governing America

Loads but that is "Agile"

Does lots of stuff really fast

Deliver something that mostly works

Do more stuff really fast, fix some of the mess from the first release, break some more.

Deliver more new funky features that don't work but PMs are happy,

Rinse and repeat.

Security?????

Nah, who needs to test security, there was a pen test 9 months ago. The fact that this shite did not exist then passes the developers by,

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

hoola Silver badge

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

Similar here, Public Sector, Education then Private Sector.

There is this obsession touted by some media forums and then amplified by people who just KNOW that all Public Sector/Civil Servant employees are total wasters, especially if they work from home.

Everything that they think they don't use or consume is a complete waste and in their view those employees add no value to anything.

To most people with these views the only function that the public sector should be doing is emptying the bins.

AI infrastructure investment may be $8T shot in the dark

hoola Silver badge

Re: Shovels

The UK can invest all it likes, it takes far too long to develop, ramp up production and gain acceptance into a finicky market.

It is simply not going to happen for AI and like any other future fad.

hoola Silver badge

Re: Shock - Horror! Future UNCERTAIN

There is one key phrase here that for those old farts who have been around IT since the dawn of time already knew:

"execs scramble to keep up with hype"

Who would have thought it???????

After leaving citizens on hold for 798 years, UK tax authority has £1B for CRM upgrade

hoola Silver badge

Tax Complexity

Perhaps (and maybe this is a bit radical) they could spend a chunk of that money recreating the tax system so that it is not millions of pages with so many holes that those who have money to employ expensive lawyers and accounts actually pay a fair share of the tax take.

The problem is that it has just evolved and every change is simply patched on top of the existing mess.

A bit like Windows in some ways.........

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

hoola Silver badge

Re: Attrition

Realistically I supposed they could always just import a kit of parts (all manufactured in the Far East) then just glue and screw them together,

This achieves nothing but a small number of not very skilled jobs, You simply cannot uplift manufacturing on this scale and move it to another country.

It still does not get away from the much deeper situation that whatever the US (or anyone else) thinks, stuff will have to be imported.

M365 Family users wake up to notice 'Your subscription expired'

hoola Silver badge

Re: And that's why...

Support for Office 2010 ended in October 2020.

That is now 5 years with no patching..........

On any other topic people would be screaming about not using out of date software.

hoola Silver badge

Re: And that's why...

Because for most it is the only option that is considered.

The average consumer does not look for alternatives unless the monthly/yearly cost is too high.

hoola Silver badge

Re: And that's why...

For most of the people affected they are not actually going to be in the position to do the much troubleshooting/fixing

They are consumers, not technical users so are reliant on the plethora of shite that a Google search returns,

"Oh I had that problem to an fixed it" - nobody actually says what the fix it

"Uninstall and reinstall"

"Reboot"

"Reinstall Windows"

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

hoola Silver badge

Re: Glad to know

In the upper echelons of the EU where these schemes are plotted and decisions made I am not sure that poor public sector pay is an issue.......

Specsavers takes off the Oracle glasses, sees better ERP options

hoola Silver badge

Re: OK, I'll bite

You may be correct but increasingly all I see is appalling "App-fronted" Web sites that use a mush of code and features scraped off Google. Decent developers who understand what they ate doing are retiring.

What is the norm now is usless script kids playing with React so it looks great but is utterly unusable.