Posts by hoola

Intel cans luxury R&D center, promises parking lot instead

Re: Energy costs and political costs

Merkel was pandering to the highly vocal and pretty effective green party and lobby groups. The Greens have a significant number of MPs and in a coalition that can have a lot of power.

https://www.tatsachen-ueber-deutschland.de/en/politics-germany/parliament-parties

That the outcome is what it is should have been seen as a risk.

Remember the first big spike in gas prices at the end of 2021 was due to Germany having to use their gas reserves to generate electricity due to 6 months of sustained low output from wind. As that period extended into winter they were replenishing those reserves as demand increased due to winter further driving up prices.

But so what, 100% renewable energy is achievable as long as there is gas to make up the shortfall......

Just like all the people who believe their 100% renewable tariff in the UK is "renewable". It is not, it is based on an estimate of what renewable energy will be generated and is totally reliant on other sources to actually work. Now if those people and businesses are happy to be cut off or load reduced when renewable output cannot meet demand that is fine and they can pay lower prices for their 100% renewable power.

Techies ask PM to 'prepare UK chip strategy as a matter of urgency'

There is the third possibility:

It is "invested in" by a bunch of VC scrotes so that it can "expand and develop".

The VC lot then asset strip leaving an worthless shell behind and millions of pounds of debt.

It depends on what they are trying to achieve

And also on The Register we have:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/20/foundry_revenues_cliff/?td=keepreading

If the argument is that we need to have chip fabrication plants in the UK for security then maybe but it all depends on what they are making.

Just have a chip fab is only part of the equation. Not all plants produce the same chips.

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Re: Far too close to home

I have lost count of the number of Apple users who come into meetings to do a presentation and have no charge, not connectors, absolutely sod all and expect it to connect to a projector or screen.

If people want to use these things and they have absolutely no useful ports on them for operating in the real work, go an buy the bloody adapters and bring then with you.

Yet the appear surprised when the VGA lead, HDMI lead or standard USB Bharco thingy will not connect or work and state "oh, I had this at the last customer".

Personally I would just throw them out the door and tell them to come back when they have the appropriate equipment. There is a PC connected, you just had to put your huge PowerPoint presentation on a USB key and run it. They don't have a USB, cannot use anyone else's because their policy says it is not permitted to be plugged into their device, cannot email it because it is "Confidential", and so on.

It really winds me up. Fortunately I don't have to deal with that any more.

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

Re: Wait, what?

Probably it is related to all the "Click to run" stuff that Office appears to use instead of a traditional shortcut pointing to an executable.

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

Re: Frightening

Remote diagnosis of faults that cannot be fixed or are so expensive to fix, it is cheaper to buy a new one.

Particularly as the fault is probable on the wretched overly complicated board that is needed to support all the "Smart" Shite....

Re: Baidu.cn and Yandex.ru.

You will need a mega-injunction then, and if this comment need censoring, Clapham Junction?

To sell stuff, collect data and fulfil the insatiable appetite of the millions who thing that being able do something on the phone is "cool".

That it adds no value is irrelevant.

As far as security is concerned, they have no concerns. Security is a concept that is completely alien to them. The average consumer has minimal idea what happens when you connect all this shite to the Internet.

Exactly, my Miele oven (well all my appliances) are 20 years old and work fine without being "Smart".

They can even be repaired!!!!!

Yes they were expensive but they have paid for themselves many time over compared to buying cheap stuff.

Tesla eyes Nevada for Semi electric truck plant, battery factory

Re: "Center placement of the driver's seat"

Maybe the could call it a trike and just give it one wheel at the front,

Clearly it would need lots of chrome, some large exhausts and appropriate noise.

Re: "Center placement of the driver's seat"

Some pillock who has no concept of the real world. Remember that their goal is "self driving (ha ha)" so the "driver" is just asleep in the seat to be a scapegoat when the computer make an inappropriate decision.

These is pretty much nothing a driver is going to be able to do if an HGV driven by shonky software does something stupid.

James Webb Space Telescope suffers another hitch: Instrument down

Software or Hardware

If the issue is software or firmware so can be updated without bricking the instrument any further then hopefully it can be fixed. It it is anything else then it is on a knife edge, there is only so much you can do to reboot something remotely, and this is about as remote as it gets.

Good luck to the team working on this, there is a lot at stake and there will be many people on the edge of their seats.

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Re: Downtime?

Not any more, most school now are part of Academy Trusts, business with huge teams of CEOs, Executives Heads and admin staff all sucking money out of the system. Pretty much everything schools use now is some sort of cloud service or SaaS provided by a "specialist company". For the latter look no further than the biometric stuff that is forced on pupils for the highly dangerous and complex task of paying for a meal. Apparently using a fingerprint means the system can bring up a photo so that they can see if the pupil matches.

That an ID card with a barcode/QR code could do the same thing is irrelevant.

Sorry, this one really pissed me off when my kids were at high school. It was SaaS sold to the trust for a huge subscription that promptly made all the queues 3 or 4 times as long because the stupid finger pint readers were incapable or reliably detecting a finger print.

Academy Trusts all sound fuzzy wuzzy warm and somehow dedicated to doing the best for the schools. They are just businesses taking tax payer's money and putting it into manglement's pockets.

Re: Important cloudy metric: hours of unavailability (aka downtime)

Correct but if you are on-prem, the costs are (mostly) peaks & troughs not a nice monthly bill that looks smaller.

That is actually costs far more is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is the monthly cost looks small.

It is the same for so much that is purchased in recent years. The only figure people look at is the monthly cost, sod how long it is for or if you actually own anything.

Re: Advertising Standards

But is you could still login then the service is considered to be "up".

The fact that it is totally unusable is irrelevant to desk wallahs that push all the marketing crap about 99.9999999999999% uptime.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Re: The fundamental problem with the business

The view is correct however it is not appropriate to just stop paying the rent because you don't feel like it.

Musk/Twitter need to continue paying their rent on all the premises and then negotiate their way out of the contracts.

Just because Musk thinks we does not want to pay does not make it correct. I am sure that he expects to be paid on time. If the company is insolvent that is another matter but at the moment I am not sure that is the case.

If it is insolvent then do everyone a favour and close Twitter down.

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

8PB is perfect for object storage. There are plenty of solutions out there using vendor rolled appliances or reference architecture on the likes of HPE.

The Apollo hardware is perfect for object store.

Pretty much any cloud storage is going to be underpinned by some form of object storage, it is the only thing that works at these sorts of scales.

Half of environmental claims about products are full of crap, says EU

Re: Stretching It A Bit, But.....

There is loads of stuff that is just chucked into bins, people don't care and rubbish is not sorted.

Oh dear, AWS. Cloud growth slowing as customers get a dose of cost reality

Maturing Market?

Perhaps we are reaching the point were all the easy wins and quick sales have ended. The easy stuff is now in the cloud, those remaining either don't want to lose control of their systems, cannot afford the shift or have looked at what has happened and made the decision, "no thanks".

Quite how 35 percent growth in the three months to September 2022 can be disappointing just goes to show how bent the entire market is.

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

But that is "The Cloud" for you.

It simply does not matter what the energy source is it all costs money and despite all the blarney about "green data centres", pretty much all they do is convert electricity into heat, some noise and a bit of compute that is sometimes useful.

Re: Any of these in QA?

But Q&A is a direct cost to the business and in the eyes of manglement adds no value.

Remember that with all this agile shite you just fix all the bugs (coding cockups) as you go along in the next iteration, or just ignore them because nobody in the development teams gives a stuff that a piece of functionality is broken.

The race to the bottom on pay, skills and quality of outcome.

The last is irrelevant to the people at the top because they NEVER have to deal with the moronic stupidity or their decisions.

Because everyone in the sector is doing the same, it pretty much makes no difference.

A long time ago there was a picture of an Indian gentleman in rags peddling a bike connected to a dynamo. It was powering a laptop and the caption was "HP Support"

I cannot find it anywhere.

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

And collect even more data on individuals.

University still living in the Nineties seeks help with move to SAP S/4HANA

You could say the same about any sector.

Each institution is a business in it's own right. They have different ways of doing stuff and there have been plenty of arguments on El Reg about software vendors forcing organisation down sub-optimal routes.

On the other hand have spent many years working for such an institution I have also seen all the arguments that go round time and time again about the "requirements" that it appears no supplier can satisfy.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Exactly, I was thinking exactly the same thing.

It is stored in the cloud somewhere therefore there is a possibility (however remote) that it can be compromised.

Even if you setup your own server there is still issues of vulnerability.

Surely the best option is to NOT save you passwords in a cloud-based application. KeePass springs to mind as something I have used for many years.

At the end of the day most people just store the passwords in the web browser anyway, it is the easiest and the average user will always take the simplest route or the one that is offered first.

Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

Re: An step in the path to reduce the number of pilots needed to fly commercial.

Texting or updating social media on their phone

Drivers appear to believe it is more important than being in control of their car all the time.

To be fair to the pilots one would hope that it is very unlikely they would be using a personal device "at work".

Re: Can be done - small boys doing it already

I suspect that for most people the only thing the care about is the cost to get to their latest cheap holiday destination. How they get there and who is doing the driving/piloting is a total irrelevance.

On the other hand I know some people who are friends of a friend who never put both children on the same plane as both parents. The parents are always split, one with the children. one on a separate flight.

The lunacy of this becomes even better when they will quite happily all get into the same vehicle to drive 100 miles to get to the airport.

Re: An step in the path to reduce the number of pilots needed to fly commercial.

Ahh, but there you are wrong, the major failure will not happen as everything is double or triple redundancy, cross checked and so on.

All the things that smart people believe are failsafe until the event they did not think of occurs.

To be fair, physical reliability has improved hugely however the outcome now is that the event is either minor or catastrophic with very little in between. The scary part is that system reliability had generally got worse as complexity and complacency have increased.

Re: reducing the crew cost of operating the plane

The accuracy with altitude on GPS is not great. In reality it will have to be based on some sort of digital altimeter.

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

Whilst I agree with you this is not just a Windows issue.

We had a stack of Linux VMs running all sorts of bits and pieces on ancient versions that were long part end of life. That lifetime may have been a bit longer than more recent Windows version but to be fair, Windows 7 has been going for a very long time.

Released July 2009

General support stopped in January 2020

Finally killed in January 2023

Debian Jessie

Released June 2018

General support stopped in June 2018

Finally killed in June 2020

Re: re: Or so you believe

There are two threads to that depending on the drivers

If the organisation cares about support, updates and security then the likelihood is it will had few unsupported operating systems (or software) so will be running later versions. They will also have a high degree of compliance and risk assessment in place

If the organisation just takes the latest and greatest of the OS then by default they will also be getting the updates in a timely manner as it is on by default.

In both cases I am not sure that by just running Windows 10 or 11 you have a lower view of security.

You could also say that anyone running an older, unsupported version of any operating system is more at risk because they don't care about security. The only exceptions to that being that it has no network and never has any removable media plugged in (unless it has been scanned elsewhere).

NASA overspent $15m on Oracle software because it was afraid an audit could cost more

Re: Won't be the only ones.

Given that when you buy software or subscribe to use software, all you get is a guarantee that you have paid money to the vendor. All the legal waffle pretty much states that:

You have the right to use it

There is no guarantee it will do what you want

There is no guarantee it will work

You might be entitled to updates

For subscriptions, the service can be updated and changed at anytime

If it does break there is no liability on the part of the vendor

In fact the only guarantee you get is that whatever happens, you are screwed.

US schools sue Meta, Google and friends over 'youth mental health crisis'

Re: parents are stopped from taking responsibility by the social media network

Whilst I understand partly where you are coming from in that it is possible to implement parental controls on devices, the issue is that for the average person this is simply beyond comprehension.

There are also far to many parent's that use tablets and phones as "free" childcare, dump offspring somewhere with the device and leave them to amuse themselves. Those people are not going to give a stuff if the child is connecting to social media sites they should not.

There is no age verification that works. Even if there was, it is far too easy to work around.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Re: vanilla

In a rectangular cardboard box about 15" long.

That was the height of decadence when I was a kid. If you really pushed the boat out you had two (slightly soft) wafers.

Easier said than done.

What do you do then in the case of a collaboration tool?

Run multiple products in parallel.

It really does not matter where you go now the applications you run are usually a single point of failure, it is simple not possible to run something in parallel "just in case".

The underlying OS is becoming less relevant.

Royal Mail, cops probe 'cyber incident' that's knackered international mail

Re: Hmm, 'Incident'?

They have to report the incident to the ICO regardless of what the understanding is due to the time constraints or notification. It is very easy to be critical from the outside of one of these incidents.

Yes it may be systems a failure but that is usually apparent pretty early on so the likelihood is that there has been some sort of ransomware or similar event.

I agree with you on the Horizon debacle but that is not just down to Royal Mail, Fujitsu are just as culpable, if not more but appear to have escaped without much impact.

Remember the Ozone hole? The satellite that spotted it just caused a space junk scare

Re: Why did ozone hole appear and then disappear?

SO2 is the other nasty that is conveniently forgotten now. Millions of trees in Northern Europe, Baltics and what was the USSR were killed by acid rain due to countries like the UK, Germany etc burning coal for electricity, etc.

Now we hack down trees, ship them 1000s of miles and burn them as pellets to generate electricity thus claiming it is "green" and carbon neutral.

Virgin Orbit doesn't

Re: Here we go, Gromit!

I think the advantage is even more fundamental, you don't need anything other than an runway and support for a 747 to accommodate the physical side of the launch. Compare that to all the other launches and it makes a huge amount of sense.

Does it matter if the payload is not that large as the focus now appears to be on filling space with commercial Cubsats?

Atos will be paid $29m over $1b UK Met Office supercomputer dispute

Re: More questions than answers.

In HPC the CPU, architecture, links memory etc are all connected and part of the solution. You don't usually design supercomputers around chips and chipsets that are at the wrong end of the lifecycle.

This is Public Sector Procurement

Having been involved in procurement as part of the public sector everything is a merry-go-round of arse covering.

Raynor ranting that the Government is not looking after public money is a minor piece of detail.

Everything in creating tenders is about contracts and legal teams protecting the organisation against unsuccessful responses suing them. Whether the successful bid actually delivers what is required is of lower priority.

What is equally poor is these companies believe that it is acceptable to sue because they were not accepted. There are two sides to the problem and in my view it is the attitude that these providers of services and solutions believe that they can sue just because it is public sector.

Given the absolutely abysmal services and solutions they do provide yet they do everything possible to one can only feel that a reset in the entire system is needed. What goes on in public sector procurement is not tolerated in the private sector because it is so inefficient.

Apple aims to replace Broadcom, Qualcomm wireless chips with its own

Re: I don't think I recall

Exactly what Apple do with all their products.

iStuff has always been priced for what the market will stand and like most other premium products, pricing is the most important aspect as it provides exclusivity or perceived quality.

Re: Walled Garden or Prison

Wfif yes but Bluetooth is becomes very easy to force you to only use Apple accessories.

Given what we have seen in the past anything is possible, whether it is desirable is another thing but their customer base appears pretty resilient when it comes to being pushed to only buy Apple products with an appropriate premium on the price.

Here's how to remotely take over a Ferrari...account, that is

Re: Pure BS and security is really only a PR problem

It is more than just code though. The fashion for everything to be connected as if it somehow makes things better is as much a part of the problem.

For some reason there is this concept in the eye of the average users that because something is connect to the Internet or has an App it is magically better. Sales, Marketing droids push this and inept developers push out huge volumes of half-tested "Agile" software because it is "better".

The result is nobody in the chain gives a toss and the few of us oldies that do understand say anything we are considered to be out of date and inflexible to modern ways of working.

Yes I would like security to be better but I would also like to see much of this shite consigned to the bin completely.

Why the hell on my VW do I need to sign in with a Volkswagen Identity just to setup two profiles on the two keys (mainly so I don't have to suffer my wife's radio selection, very loud when you get in the car)? My previous Golf did not need that, it just worked.

Southwest Airlines sued for failing to give prompt refunds after IT meltdown

I suspect there is a link between their IT systems being stuffed up and the ability to process refunds in a timely manner.

I would be very surprised if there is a paper system running in parallel.....

Just accepting what a customer is presenting as proof they have booked is not that secure given the number of toe-rags out there taking any opportunity to rip people and companies off.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Re: "a strong desire to reduce refueling costs"

This is an interesting one:

Let's assume that in the future (not too distant) the equivalent of Fuel Duty starts being applied to EVs. It has to happen at some point or the revenue is made up from somewhere else.

At the moment it is very much the more fuel you use, the more you contribute and because it is take at point of dispensing it is very easy to administer and mostly unavoidable.

Now apply that to EVs:

How do you measure what is being used to charge the EV?

The easy solution is that the chargers all have a special tariff that effectively adds the duty.

How do you then stop people charging (very slowly) with a 13A plug?

How do hoe chargers meter the usage, they have to feedback somehow to somewhere?

That takes us to the most likely outcome and that is pay-per-mile road pricing.

Either the car will have it embedded (so many have connectivity now pushing metrics it is a joke) or you will need an app.

There may be some sort of transition for older vehicles but my feeling is this will be an app-driven GPS tracked solution based on mobile devices or the vehicle itself.

The final step will then be that the default for insurance will be metrics based with links to both mileage driven, location & time.

All pretty horrific but it is the way everything is going.

There are huge numbers of younger drivers now who have no option but to use a metrics based insurance because it is half the price. AN awful lot of these use the same source as well for the analytics, Cambridge Mobile Telematics. What pisses me off the most (my daughter has this) is that when it marks you down incorrectly NOTHING is done to correct the incorrect information they have. This is mostly related to speed limits.

Re: "a strong desire to reduce refueling costs"

There is also the current status that in the UK the VED is non-existent (until now).

I know that VED is only a small part of the running costs but for some people it appears to play a disproportionate influence on the running costs.

Then we have all the tax benefits for company vehicles where EVs have been pushed for no other reason than it reduced tax.

The big one for me, is as you state, an awful lot people are effectively getting free charging, either because it is a company vehicle and they an charge at work whilst it is not being used or it is out and about so if they do have to charge at services, the cost is irrelevant. Of course this is exactly what those people would get with fuel as well however this takes us full circle, tax and incentives (plus companies greenwashing) are the main drivers.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Re: FSD ≠ Autonomous

And more to the point the liability has to be with Tesla.

If you cause an accident by braking for no reason and there is clear evidence then the person at the front is deemed to be at fault.

In this case Tesla as the people responsible for the software. There has to liability sorted out so that the companies pedalling this shite are liable. Not only that they are liable to the point that it hurts and there are also real people in that chain of liability who can be prosecuted.

Until we sort that out, this functionality should not be allowed on the road. This is being driven by what are essentially tech companies that have already shown a complete lack or attention to quality control, responsibility and accountability.

If you buy a piece of software you have a right to use it with no guarantee that will function as intended, no comeback if it causes you loss and no expectation that if it breaks it will be fixed.

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

Re: Sigh . .

Because it is simple and has a browser plugin.

The same reason that there probably more passwords stored in browser profiles than anywhere else, particularly as the profile will follow the user on different devices.

Re: Private Equity Twats

Blackadder to Baldrick counting

What is this?

One bean

Adds another...

Two beans

And a third

A small casserole.

And the giant turnip....

Re: Someone Else's Password

Yes to both of those.

I make sure everyone in the family has their own Keepass instance and have setup Syncthing to a an HP Microsrver in my garage.

This is far more preferable than OneDrive or such like as the data is not left on someone else's cloud service.

I then use another product to backup the server to a cloud account where I control the encryption in flight and at rest. That gives me versioning in the event that something is lost, corrupted or one of the endpoint gets duffed over with ransomware.

But as you say, this is way beyond what most people can configure.