Posts by Karlis 1

Salesforce to buy Slack for $28bn in cash, shares – and vows to make it the new face of Customer 360

Ah well, it was good fun while it lasted.

I can feel the slimey gore oozing up from the ground already, just was it was with yammer, skype, linkedin, whatsapp, etc...

Don't worry, IT contractors. New UK chancellor says HMRC will be gentle pushing IR35 rules

Re: Unintended consequences

To be fair that all is kinda moot right now anyway. The brexit has killed IT market in London already, not as if there was much of it outside before. Whoever wants to sit out their time in Slough or Milton would likely never had much to offer to start with.

Who cares about contractors when there's no businesses to look for ones?

Virtualization juggernaut VMware hits the CPU turbo button for licensing costs

Wrong model

This one feels rather arbitrary and stupid. Surely the correct one should be based on NUMA domains?

'Is this Microsoft trying to be cool? Want to go to the Apple Store?' We checked out London's new retail extravaganza

Time is money

Apple offers high-ish priced, but fairly reliable and ready to go packages.

Microsoft offers non-stop updates and investing in time to become proficient with registry and AD debugging.

There are people who's time is actually worth something. They are the ones that pick macs and get on with earning money. Not a popular opinion here, but not everyone is an enthusiast that will give up shagging his girlfriend to pick the best candidate motherboard for his 3rd rebuild this year.

Microsoft gently leads workhorse Windows Server 1903 for a pad around the paddock

> Don't mind me, I'm just the thing you run your business on

I really hope not. There's shooting one in the foot intentionally and then there's just being plain incompetent.

Intel to finally scatter remaining ashes of Itanium to the wind in 2021: Final call for doomed server CPU line

Re: That is quite some lead time

Real wold systems that takes 3-5 years to plan to power down and corresponding maintenance contracts.

Some of that silicone powers things that matters.

Re: Just imagine

I think you have gotten your causes and effects wrong. Intel was doing perfectly fine in improving both the desktop and mobile CPUs line well before Ryzen. Their focus was on power consumption, not raw performance and I'm actually happy with that.

Since Ryzen "shook things up" ... I struggle to name a single meaningful impact on Intels' product line. Yes, they reacted with i9s. Which are pretty pointless for most purposes. They were doing just fine in iterating upwards from core2duo line while competition from AMD was nonexistent.

I appreciate your idealistic view that equal competitors will lead to best competition, but I'd like to counter that with an observation that one needs to have pretty deep pockets to go for significant generation leaps. Three equally fcked competitors racing to the bottom won't give you that. Itanium was a flop, but one that Intel could afford. Via couldn't, nether could cyrix. Let's not mention transmeta.

Semi-monopoly that delivers the goods is fine.

Samsung Galaxy A9: Mid-range bruiser that takes the fight to Huawei

Reg, staph, what are you doing?!

A link from an el Reg article to ... CARPHONE WH0REHOUSE?

I'll expect an in-depth positive reviews of Apple hardware (provided by their PR) next...

Microsoft gets ready to kill Skype Classic once again: 'This time we mean it'

Liars and forced updates

Used to be a skype fan. Was holding out on the last 7 version. And yes - I had very much unchecked any auto-updates and avoided any prompts.

Ho-hum, one night it just updated to the electron(?) based uber-crap flash-fest. No options, no explanations, half the features gone, recent chats view a complete disarray...

I hope it dies soon. I won't have to keep it alive for the sake of the few conversations with the holdouts.

No wonder Oracle exec Kurian legged it – sky darkens as cloudy tech does not make it rain

> Oracle's cloud business is slowing down after experiencing an eyebrow-raising meteoric rise.

There was never a "meteoric rise". Everyone in the industry knows that the numbers were fake and propped up by forcing customers to give it a spin under the threat of skinning them dry during the voluntary audits.

Next to experience sudden unexplained slowdown in adoption - Microsoft Azure joke.

Linux kernel's Torvalds: 'I am truly sorry' for my 'unprofessional' rants, I need a break to get help

SUSE and Microsoft give enterprise Linux an Azure tune-up

Wonder how badly strapped for cash SuSE must be...

Whoa, AWS, don't slip off your cloudy perch. Google and Microsoft are coming up to help

I do have to wonder... Gartner keeps repeating Microsoft as being of relevance. That does not mirror what I see in the industry. Except their forced cloud365 offerings nobody seems to even remotely consider them as a platform to use.

What am I missing? There's a well-hidden part of industry that actually uses Azure? Gartner just can't spend the money from Microsoft fast enough? Somehow using cloud offering translates in using the cloud platform?

Baffled...

Cluster-f*ck! Etcd DBs spaff passwords, cloud keys to world by default

Awesome software?

"As we learned from the MongoDB experience this is a huge footgun that can be easily removed [from] otherwise awesome software."

I hope he isn't implying that MongoDB is such. etcd arguably is quite good (raft!), but mongrel...

You can resurrect any deleted GitHub account name. And this is why we have trust issues

GO is a special snowflake case here...

To be fair this has more to do with the fact that Go current toolchain not only encourages, but literally presents as the only option dependency management by pointing them to live repos. That's the only reason why I refuse to invest any time and effort in learning more of it what otherwise looks like a really nifty cross of good and pragmatic ideas and computer science.

Now, the bigger picture can be analysed on and on and on and things like node repos model is braindead too, but at least they pretend. In case of Go it is the official way.

(which might work for google where everything is one big repo and they are so far ahead of everyone else that they rarely need to worry about _external_ dependencies, but is like giving a loaded gauge #4 of buckshot to a depressed teenager and expecting it to end well)

France may protect citizens' liberté with ban on foreigners buying local big data firms

And once done wonder why not a single such company would be started under flag of France (not that there are many there).

No sane investor/entrepreneur would pre-emptively block their exits like that.

Azure VMs borked following Meltdown patch, er, meltdown

> This is down for 8 hours and still no ETA. Is this the kind of support we should expect from Microsoft.

yes?

Full-fibre ISP Hyperoptic clocked over mock doc schlock shock

I miss hyperoptic. They were the bees gees in my flat in London. 800+u/d and 0.7ms pings to LIX. :(

Have you heard the one about IoT network tech that uses SIM cards?

So, yeah, they have, effectively, discovered SMS - which happens to be a payload on top of this protocol IIRC (my leet ss7/smsc skills are an honest decade out of date now).

Good on them. If they'll manage to secure shedloads of cash on the basis of this I'll be quite sad - and looking for the names of investors to sell them a goundbreaking concept of making things that go round - well, round.

(But actually - do really GOOD ON THEM! Somebody actually does something sensible as opposed to hur-hur-new-networks-for-iot-wanking that even bigger names like vodafone has fallen prey to).

Introducing EE4J – Java EE's fling with the Eclipse Foundation

Eclipse Foundation - where dead code goes to die again.

Good riddance.

Oracle VP: 'We want the next decade to be Java first, Java always'

Re: Loving Java, hating Oracle

> I know most people don't bother to think about that because storage space and computing power is cheap these days, but I don't like that.

And yet you use netbeans. Hmm. (okay, at least it is not Eclipse - where dead projects go to die second time. Which is why the whole eclipse foundation thing is not encouraging at all...)

Huggy feely idiocity?

> For Alvarez, Java provided a path to improve the future by bringing more women into the tech industry.

Wat?

Look! We have direct fibre connection too, wails Google Cloud

I find the sponsored articles trying to imply that Azure somehow is a significant or even meaningful player in the cloud space rather tiring.

Can we stop peddling Gartner level bullshit all around?

P≠NP proof fails, Bonn boffin admits

Bayesian? What is this, 2002?

Surely they meant to say "Analysing via means of real-time driven big-data machine learning utilising state of the art infrastructure of our sponsors at Azure - providers of the most stable and scalable cloud computing infrastructure for unprecedented super-computing tasks for tomorrows demanding research effort..."

(of fuck it, I'm only on my second coffee and couldn't continue in fears of throwing up. I'm so sorry mum. I couldn't help. It's the commies fault!)

Where is that bottle of scotch?

Nasty firmware update butchers Samsung smart TVs so bad, they have to be repaired

Re: Bricked TVs

> it's not on a network, so also no nagging. I made sure of that.

Haha! Joke is on you. Quite often updates are delivered via freesat download.

Reality strikes Dixons Carphone's profits after laughing off Brexit threat

Re: That's it, blame it on phone users

I tried to buy a phone from them one day. When I realised it is conditional to me giving up all my personal data ... I noped out of it.

Sadly the only business cases where you can exchange money for a service without strings attached these days seem to be online.

Facebook won't change React.js license despite Apache developer pain

Less people using that horrid framework? How would that be a loss?!

Google diversity memo: Web giant repudiates staffer's screed for 'incorrect assumptions about gender'

Talking about role models

I appreciate the mantra that balanced and inclusive workplace voicing all different opinions somehow is better, but I struggle to find woman role models in leadership positions that have not ended up a complete heartless psychotic disasters. Mayer, May, Thatcher?

Can somebody name the "good" role models at the top of the game?

New iPhone details leak: Yes, Apple is still chasing Samsung

Frankly this post is a pile of crap.

"most notably that the company is still desperately chasing Samsung."

Yeah... By offering a far far far superior mobile OS and features that actually work and are not crippled by operators malware / manufacturers (poorly coded and even worse designed) ideas of "enhanced user experience and market differentiator".

I get it, piling shit on Apple is fashionable, but it's both foolish and rather ignorant. I would LOVE to see Android based devices approaching a tenth of software and ecosystem maturity, but I'm not holding my breath.

Kids will like cheap plastic toys. For some of us things that actually work are important.

Tired: Java. Desired: Node.js. Retired: The suggestion a JavaScript runtime is bonkers

> Consider a remark by Rod Vagg, chief Node officer at NodeSource, about the advantages of npm, the Node Package Manager. "Having come from Java, it's a breath of fresh air," he said.

Advantages compared to what? Is he on crack? Maybe needs to be subject to MHA section 3? What about the times trivial things have broken half the internet?

Funnily enough, charging ££££s for trashy bling-phones wasn't a great idea

Lots of uninformed comments here. Heh, also earth is flat.

Vertu was a little boutique arm of Nokia well before iThing was around.

Their phones/devices were a niche thing, but a fair niche - quality casings, impeccable service. When you are earning on the order of thousands an hour a downtime of few hours pays for itself.

Some time ago they were providing a concrete value add on. On top of 6320i and then S40.

They made the bad bad mistake of mixing up with Android. For some time it was okay since stock Android was still a good experience, but ... then it no longer was.

Yes, their market has been taken over by iThing, sometimes with bling, but more often than not just as default. Somehow target market is happy with it.

Shame on 200 really talented guys still sticking it out, but ... well, it didn't work out.

Gartner confirms what we all know: AWS and Microsoft are the cloud leaders, by a fair way

Let me fix: The cloud leader is AWS and M$ also has a cloud offering.

It's a pretty well known fact that any assessment of Microsoft by Gartner needs to be discounted by at least 70%. Why they keep sucking that particular lollypop is not clear, but ho-hum, they do.

Anyone considering Azure as anything mature, even less so stable, must have very pointy hair with a very strong case of "nobody got fired by buying services from our synergic cloud leaders in enterprise space and price gouging".

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

> BA has a very large IT infrastructure;

Expected.

> it has over 500 data cabinets spread across six halls in two different sites near its Heathrow Waterside HQ.

That's all? That's barely a medium infrastructure. Ok, 500 racks is not small, but it is a looooong way off from _very large_.

Are telcos' customers expecting too much of IoT connectivity techs?

> It's like no one is thinking or thought about security.

But it is in the cloud! It's secure!

Seriously though - what a waste of time and effort and resources. No, mobile operators should _NOT_ be involved in any global IoT initiative. Any spectrum they'll get will be prioritised for revenue generating stuff, there is no business case for billions of data treacles (yet). And even if there was a business case ... eh.

Microsoft's cmd.exe deposed by PowerShell in Windows 10 preview

"whether PowerShell should be seen as part of Microsoft's outreach to Linux customers"

Is this the kind of outreatch that involves gloves and vaseline? My buttocks clenched from just reading this line...

Dropbox apologies for clunky administrator account access on Macs

Meh, that's a poorly written article.

1) Dropbox doesn't store/retain/use or whatever your admin password. During installation it requests it so it can inject itself with an accessibility permission (which is fairly unlimited, to be granted).

2) The fishy bit is that it circumvents the existing OSX elevation methods and instead just settles for the jugular - injecting itself far deeper in the system than it should.

Which really brings the crux of the problem. Why the f*k should a cloud files sync service require kernel extensions or inject itself as a virtual filesystem in the first instance. What the hell was wrong with the model where it had a folder, kept monitoring it and if anything changed, synced the files?

Me thinks we should ring up the BOFH and point him to a couple of product managers in Dropbox HQ. Heck, I'd sharpen the spade myself.

PCI Council wants upgradeable credit card readers ... next year

Fuzznugets!

Ah, throwing technology at the wall to solve:

* Slow deployment of Chip&Pin due to resistance from retailers because of fees.

* "Securing" end terminals when all the recent major breaches have targeted insecure back offices of large companies non-compliant with even tenth of existing PCI standards.

* "Hardening" POS devices when the common way to skim the card at the restaurant is to snap a photo of it.

I'm not impressed. As much as I'd like to be a leet hax0r breaking into the shops at night with a drill bit to replace the firmware on the two dented card readers I'll stick to sending funny cat videos to corporate office beancounters staff. Actually enforcing PCI DSS and having consequences for ignoring it would be far far bigger result than preventing me to target a grocery store where customers have maybe $10 left on their accounts to nick.

US Marine Corps to fly F-35s from HMS Queen Lizzie as UK won't have enough jets

Re: At least he's got a good sense of humour.

This is how you know that the government knows this will never happen: "Indeed it is, beyond question, at the appropriate juncture, in due course, in the fullness of time."

(Credit to Yes, Minister. A mandatory watch to anyone interested in what politicians and officials actually mean when they seem to agree with something)

BYOD battery bloodbath? Facebook 'fesses up to crook code

Not just the apps

I've long been planning to fire up a VM and measure how much traffic something like verge takes to load. And MORE IMPORTANTLY - just to stay in the background tab.

Anecdotical evidence suggests that results would be shocking, just haven't had the time to get to it. Someone with white hat could do it (referencing me as an idea, would be appreciated).

Bono: Apple will sort out monetising music where the labels failed

"new music format that will make buying music “irresistible”"

Sounds to me that U2 stunt was just a test run. Next Apple will simply dump new releases in our libraries and charge our cards directly. No opt-out, therefore irresistible.

Well, maybe 'some' tailoring to your taste will be possible. Until the next Justin Bieber mega-hit will come out.

Oh noes, fanbois! iPhone 6 Plus shipments 'DELAYED' in the UK

For what it's worth my pre-order still appears to be coming on time (Friday morning). Admittedly I ordered it within 5 minutes of pre-orders opening. Any delays appear to be purely due to allocated stock running out (which, for a fairly popular physical hardware, doesn't sound _too_ far stretched - it still has to be assembled at a certain bounded rate, tested, allocated to one of the launch countries and shipped).

Even if we assume that Apple is run by baby eating evil megalomaniacs in marketing it would be a bit of a stretch to imagine that they are refusing to take your cash purely to demonstrate some 'artificial' shortage.

Bonking with Apple has POUNDED mobe operators' wallets

Re: Crazy.

> It seems rather like 3DTV - hyped and drooled over by 'analysts', but in reality it's a technology looking for a demand.

I never have understood why the manufacturers are trying their damnest to feck up a simple (and working) experience where you press a button and the thing displays a picture. Killing off the best display technology we had for a reasonable price in process (yeah, I'm a plasma fan). If I want to browse internet, watch porn or catch-up I will use my laptop, my tablet and my cable providers perfectly adequate box (thank God they haven't tried to put a Pentium 4 so they could offer 'premium services' in these boxes yet).

BOFH: You can take our lives, but you'll never take OUR MACROS

Steering a luser to use Access. No way that is going to end well.

My bet is on Access requiring a plugin installation to work with data older than 7 years, installation media for which was just delivered in the basement, in the shipment with a carpet, showel and to bags of lime.

BlackBerry's Passport will be the WEIRDEST mobe of 2014

Nokia did all sorts of very weird designs - whilst being de facto leader in the market with not a threat in sign. One still wonders how they threw it all away...

Developers: Your chance to get hands on with Microsoft Azure

Or, you could, you know, use something that works. Amazon springs to mind.

BOFH: He... made... you... HE made YOU a DOMAIN ADMIN?

Ah, we've been missing you

Good to see that Simon is back in form!

(Although lack of boobytraps in the domain permissions scripts seem to be a grossly negligent oversight - as evident by the costs incurred by the company now that medical insurance and scrap disposal will have to get involved)

Gone

Re: Re: Too bad it's Nokia :/

Good try, Chief Marketing Officer of Nokia UK.

NSA refuses to deny spying on members of Congress

Re: (Yawn)

Good job on following the party line.

Of course some of us might disagree with the notion that employees in a government agency (which is proving to be ungovernable) can have all of our life communications record at their disposal a single query away. Especially as Snowden has shown again and again that his claims are substantiated and has repeatedly described that these kind of queries are being made daily by low level staffers spying on their love interests, et cetera.

But that's totally not spying. Nether is it spying the next time an important vote that might have an impact on the NSA or their friends in the commercial world comes up and key senators, hypothetically, receive a transcript or two of their anonymous communications (technically true - that's not spying, just plain old blackmail).

Dell tells staff: If you haven't got stomach for private era, leave

Targeting by exclusion?

Nobody from India, nor from Singapore, nor from EMEA, nether anybody from Software group - who exactly is eligible then? A couple of janitors and the Hardware Engineering group in US only?

Calling Doctor Caroline Langensiepen of Nottingham Trent uni

But was there an assignment in the first place?

The cunning bit might be that there wasn't an assignment at all - the bloke just wanted to get published to win an unspecified, but most certainly excessive, amount of lagers at the local uni pub.