Posts by The Empress

Meta accused of hiring Republican consultancy to seed anti-TikTok rumors

Kill them all

Let God sort it out

Axed data scientist sues IBM claiming he was discriminated against as a man

You can be employed by IBM if

You're not white male straight over age 30. Those are the rules

Microsoft details 'planet-scale' AI infrastructure packing 100,000-plus GPUs

Just dedicate 70% of every Windows 11 machine

To that singular task.

Cambodia cans critics of its snoopy Internet Gateway, says every nation has one

Cheaper and easier to outsource the work to Google

They would do it cheaper and more reliably

Microsoft Teams unable to send and receive calls for some after update

Who cares?

98% of all calls and meetings are an utter waste of time and effort

IBM Cloud to offer Z-series mainframes for first time – albeit for test and dev

I'm sure it's a nightmare from a licensing perspective

Z series licensing has always been a money printing machine for IBM I wonder how they will ever be able to merge cloud with how they actually make money on Z?

IBM looked to reinvigorate its 'dated maternal workforce'

They can't even drag out the cynical argument that it worked

Let's say IBM loses their case and they're held responsible. Let's say part of IBM's defense was "But it worked and we have a responsibility to do that". But it didn't work. It failed. They fired everyone with a brain and replaced them with 21 year social justice warriors and diversity hires who stuck around for 2 or 3 years and then bailed on the company. So IBM's strategy didn't work because the problem with IBM has never been the people they hire. The problem is IBM. The problem is the people IBM puts in charge. No one wants to work for a monolithic company with 17 layers of management. When I started at IBM I was 5 people from the CEO. At one point I was 13 people away and when I left they had somehow managed to flatten that to 9. IBM wants younger people for two reasons: 1) they're cheaper and 2) they're easier to push around. They don't want smart bright cutting edge people. That they can buy with an acquisition. They fired old people because the company no longer values skill, knowledge or experience and sees everyone as a cost center to be squashed out.

The end of free Google storage for education

NYC spends $60,000 per student per year

They have the money. But it goes to paying for each school to have 200 administrators at $200k/year each

Full-time internet surveillance comes to Cambodia this week

Little different from Canada's proposed C-10 and C-11 bills

It's really a matter of branding and spin. When developing countries do it it's fascism. When modern western 'democracies' do it it's for your own safety.

Reality check: We should not expect our communications to remain private

It's sort of a moot point

tech providers from Google to Meta and beyond know everything you do think want need feel and say and happily send all that info to the government for free, and unrequested in their drive to crush all thoughts they don't approve of. Yes nothing is private. Nothing. Now what?

RIP Ninjacat: No longer fits in Windows 11 world

Hopefully a dozen diversity executives argued for 6 months about this

Because there is nothing more important than this

Use Zoom on a Mac? You might want to check your microphone usage

99% of all users pay no attention to any settings

Not security settings, not privacy, not device configuration, nothing. All they care about is does it work. And even if you pointed it out what to do they wouldn't care because adding one step or one button would be too hard for them.

This is going well: Meta adds anti-grope buffer zone around metaverse VR avatars

Seems to not go far enough

Why not give Meta police powers to come to your house and shoot you if you don't obey their rules? It would placate leftists and solve a bunch of problems.

Google Cloud started running its servers for an extra year, still loses billions

So at some point Google will pull the plug

Google is famous for suddenly announcing the end of a product. This too will happen to Google Cloud. Customers will roll out of bed and read the news that the product is gone

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

It's not that it's impossibly hard to do

It's that it died a perfectly predictably death under the idiotic top heavy process driven we have more lawyers and accountants than scientists ethos of IBM. They got rid of most R&D long ago and decided to purchase all their expertise. The problem was in then forcing all those bright young acquisitions into the Big Blue Blockhead Method. Every acquisition chained the top talent to the firm for 2-3 years, they vest and then run for the doors. Why? Because no small young aggressive nimble company wants to work for 13 vice presidents who all want status reports and detailed metrics on a daily basis.

Running Windows 10? Microsoft is preparing to fire up the update engines

I am sure one of these updates is designed to trash your machine

MS will I'm sure embed an update that someday will blow up your machine forcing you either to upgrade to W11 or buy a whole new machine,

Machine needs more Learning: Google Drive dings single-character files for copyright infringement

Not good enough

Google should be given ownership of all your personal papers, financial records and health information so that you can be 'protected'

ALL HAIL BRANDONIA

Another US president, time for another big Intel factory promise by another CEO

At what cost to the state?

All of these commitments come with massive allowances from state and local government, typically in the form of tax abatements and deferrals. The agreement is then tied to promises on the number of jobs they will create. The problem is that most of these plans fail, badly. So state and local government doesn't get their tax money, causing them to increase taxes on the rest of us and then the jobs don't materialize anyway.

The robots are coming! 12 million jobs lost to automation in Europe by 2040 – analyst

So what

We're becoming an economy of people selling insurance to each other.

For those worried about Microsoft's Pluton TPM chip: Lenovo won't even switch it on by default in latest ThinkPads

What's the real function?

Copyright protection for Microsoft products? Forced subscriptions for everything? Engineered obsolescence?

Log4j doesn't just blow a hole in your servers, it's reopening that can of worms: Is Big Biz exploiting open source?

Expensive software is rarely better though

Your main assumption, that big corps use 'free' software because it's free and good enough even when it breaks, ignores another equally important aspect. Paid-for software, often very expensive paid-for software doesn't do a great job of preemptively finding problems and correcting is, let's say, uneven. Moreover when you stumble into a major problem with their software, good luck getting it fixed unless you're a huge company or a nation-state.

TikTok says Trump administration ban is based on fake news about the app and its back end

something something

Orange man bad. Scream at the sky

When you gaze long enough into the bork, the bork will gaze back into you

Just don't invade Poland

That never ends well for anyone.

RPA firms: We have our own process mining tools. Process miner Celonis: We're all about automation now

Never give managers this tool

They will only create massive agglomerations of Feudall Empires reliant on huge scales of human intervention in order to create the right metrics.

To stop web giants abusing privacy, they must be prevented from respawning. Ever

And if that doesn't work.

Well let's test out how robust their bollards and blast shields are.

Work life balance? We've heard of it. Pandemic means 9-5 shifts are a thing of the past for many

They try to flog us donkeys 24/7

But we resist and demand to be put on shifts. I don't care if your hair is on fire, when the shop whistle blows I'm out.

After Trump, Congress, Supreme Court Justice hit out at tech giants' legal immunity, now FCC boss wants to stick his oar in, too

The best solution

Is to round up the top 500 people at every social media company. Then cut their fucking heads off and stuff them on spears. Then burn their houses down and flog their naked screaming children down the street.

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

Airprint works better on Mint anyway

It's hardly a benefit struggling with CUPS when it will never work right.

Re: will drop PPD file support soon

That's more or less the only reason to use Chrome.

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

All I need an office suite for is to read other people's horseshit. And those lovely 900 page Powerpoints they like to create at work extoling the virtues of Agile streamlined workflows. Everything else is in email or some god awful web app that's mostly json crap.

It's that time of the year when Apple convinces you last year's iPhones weren't quite magical enough, so buy this new 5G iPhone 12 instead

Sorry but my XR with iOS 14.0.1 is about as 'feature rich' as I can stand. WTF is that pulsating blob that pops up when I push and hold the power button?

Years after we detected two neutron stars crashing into each other, we're still picking up X-rays. We don't know why

Space aliens and Trump colluding to steal the 2020 election. It's science.

'20,000-plus staff' could face the chop in spin-off of IBM's IT outsourcing biz, says Wall Street analyst

So basically they're creating IndiaCo. Another Indian outsourcing company. And half the 20,0000 will come back as contractors at 3/4ths pay

Re: 20,000 people?

There's a third category - the process drones. The dull dreary plodders who blindly and stupidly follow the process no matter what it says.

Windows 0-day pops up out of nowhere Twitter

Who gives a shit anymore

Windows is fucked. The end

Here's why AI can't make a catchier tune than the worst pop song in the charts right now

Pop music is more or less made by machines already. The human, of which there are 6 or 7 in the entire industry, just press a buttons on the Macbook to string the parts together. After all, with 9 words, 1 beat and 3 notes, it's not all that hard.

IBM wants everyone to marvel at the size of its Strategic Imperatives

The old IBM is back

And not in a good way. After obscuring their financials to the point where their CFO is pulling numbers out of his ass, IBM has returned to mass firings. Who doesn't think that the Board compensation committee decided to award execs according to how many people they toss out and that alone.

Farewell then, Slack: The grown-ups have arrived

MS will screw it up

They will make a bloated clunky confusing mishmash that limps along while MS tells us it will work better if you only buy Azure and SharePoint. It won't work well with Android or iOS, it will have endless patches and unless your org is running a perfectly matched set of identical clients things will break. The beauty of Slack is that it precisely HASN'T changed much. It does what it needs to do, simply. They haven't tossed in 3 million horrible features no one wants.

Uni IT man stole £22k of Macs to pay for smack

Macs are worth more per pound than heroin

Seems like he should be stealing heroin to buy Apple products.

UK takes first step towards criminalising driverless car hackers

Let's hope all the hackers and they successfully defend their actions in court as female empowerment for women in STEM.

Twilight of the idols: The only philosophy HPE and IBM do these days is with an axe

I can't understand why IBM's board isn't indicted

I can only conclude that they're being paid to be indifferent. At some point someone has to say they're not meeting the standard of fiduciary responsibility. Billions of dollars flushed down the toilet as executives award themselves absurd bonuses and rewards.

Shopped in Forever 21? There was bank-card-slurping malware in it for, like, forever

that's fine - the only people who shop there are hookers, divorcees, and teenagers using their mom's stolen credit card.

Missed opportunity bingo: IBM's wasted years and the $92bn cash splurge

You assume they would not screw up those acquisitions

IBM reliably takes over companies, drives out the talent, IBMifies the company and drives it into the ground under a mountain of process, bureaucracy and rules.

ALPHABET TOTALLY LOSES ITS SCHMIDT: Exec chairman Eric quits

Bond Villain 2.0

He wants to be a Bond villain like Bezos

IBM asks remaining staff to take career advice from HR-bot

IBM has jobs?

That's a serious question. In my years there I never saw a single lateral posting that was real. I've never heard of someone using the system to actually find and get a different job. I never saw a single person hired in who wasn't a personal friend of a management consultant last hired by the VP. On rare occasions people were allowed to move laterally if they threatened to quit but that's clearly not going you work this time.

Cisco's purple princesses gush workplace joy

Weirrrrrrd

Since their CEO for years was gay.

Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock dead at 42

According to MSNBC

Global warming takes another one.

NSA spying is illegal? Then let's make it law, say Republicans

Maybe you're unclear who the president is

Look it up. Black guy, funny name. A democrat. His program.

Forget Nokia: Finland's promising future is to be server central

Of course you can racks and racks of servers pretty much anywhere on earth, which is kind of the point. And you're not committed to following byzantine European labor laws.

Windows XP's market share grows AGAIN!

Which is more a statement that computers don't do anything materially better or different than 10 or 12 years ago. The rest of cosmetics.