Posts by Doctor Syntax

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

Most?

First world problem

EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature ... "sweating through my sheets because the app's dead."

I suppose just unplugging the damn thing from the mains was too difficult? Probably scared of it rebooting properly when it was plugged back in.

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

"There was a bug in a recentish Windows Update that made REFS volumes unable to mount, so at this point, I can't consider it to be stable enough for production use."

Windows Update or REFS?

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

"Then get Co-Pilot to add the half page overview."

Write the overview first just to get your mind round what you need to say in the rest.

A summariser can't summarise what's yet to be written.

"Could of course just get rid of a whole tier of middle management whose entire function appears to be preparing reports for other managers to read."

Get rid of the reading tier as well. Save even more.

Spurious precision warning flag

46 minutes as opposed to three quarters of an hour. That's an instant indicator that it's a claim that's not to be trusted.

Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11

Using executable file formats for ions. Why?

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

Re: Dark Mode WTF?

Just use whatever your H/W and/or S/W provides to adjust the basic screen brightness. If you have a separate monitor there should be an adjustment there, if you're on a laptop the hieroglyphics on the function keys should tell you which function keys adjust screen brightness. And check if your desktop S/W has a brightness adjustment.

I don't know about Macs but on this laptop Fn+F8 and F9 keys adjust brightness to some extent and for more control I can go into the battery/brightness widget from the system tray.

The same thing happened in the Real World - the whiteboard replacing the blackboard.

Mobian makes Debian's latest 'Trixie' release pocket-sized

"However, we must reluctantly concede that as phones increasingly turn into sealed units ... their resistance to water, dust, and thus aging, will increase."

Their resistance to ageing won't increase, not if the batteries are sealed in.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: Shared responsibility model

Because having spent the money to get it working there they weren't going to spend more money to replicate the service in each region let alone even more money to let one region fall back to another if needed. Even from the outside it's plan to see that Amazon aren't interested in anyone asking "what if?" let alone putting in the code needed to handle the answers.

Re: Multi Region for a Reason

If we just take that a little further - multi-region seems to be either too hard or too expensive for AWS. The underlying problem here seems to be that the internal systems weren't multi-region su us-east-1 became a SPoF.

Justin Garrison in the post linked in TFA suggested that before the brain-drain AWS core was staffed by some very good engineers. If they were good why did they end up with a SPoF? Surely they were bright enough to realise that. My guess is that Amazon manglement wouldn't spend money on "what if this goes wrong" just as they wouldn't in the S/W that underlies their logistics.

"It's just a matter of which understaffed team trips over which edge case first, because the chickens are coming home to roost."

I do love a mixed metaphor. And yes, he's right. Kudos for getting in his rebuttals before the handwaving starts.

One reservation I've had about Amazon over the years, just as a shop customer, was just how thin the programming coverage was. Yes, they did things at an enormous scale but if the man in the van failed to make a delivery - or even part of a delivery it was quite unpredictable how things would pan out. An item went into a warehouse and didn't leave when it was due (probably nicked but possibly just in the wrong shelf) and nobody ever noticed. An item wasn't delivered to a locker in Yorkshire and next allegedly heard of in France while a courier turned up at the door to collect the return of the undelivered object (and wasn't surprised to be told there wasn't a return).

The question is, if this is the error handling in what must be at least one of the world's biggest logistics operations, is what's really under the covers of AWS that much better?

Benioff backs off: Salesforce chief says sorry for Trump troop talk

I was forgetting who Salesforce's customers are. Sales people. Suddenly it makes sense.

Maybe, in imitation of TACO we need the acronym BACO.

"It seems a good high percentage of US business is run by a bunch of shitty scummy amoral pond life."

That almost counts as damning with faint praise.

Will the real Benioff please stand up.

UK rethinks offshoring ban for £8M online procurement system

Re: What does keeping this data in the UK mean

Not allowed != not able to.

Re: Surely those jobs could be done in the UK ?

Not HMG, it seems.

Re: Corrupt

If a bid winner declares itself unable to meet the contract conditions in this way the contract should be cancelled and awarded to the next best bidder. Otherwise we'll have an unforeseeable event next week - in fact we already have if the Cabinet Office didn't foresee this.

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

From the Wikipedia article on DNS: This mechanism provides distributed and fault-tolerant service and was designed to avoid a single large central database. (my emphasis)

Somebody forgot the "distributed" part and that fault tolerance depends on it.

UK calls up Armed Forces veterans for digital ID soft launch

Re: onelogin

Yup, being hacked and discovering they've been hacked are two different things.

Re: pension pots

Correct. They're Ponzi schemes.

And that was because they were said to be good. They weren't.

My experience is that the private sector pension is better than the civil service one.

For one thing the taller accumulated 80ths of final salary per year of service while the private sector accumulated 60ths. The second was that, as you say, the notional contributions were implemented in the form of a reduced salary. In theory the money in the salary payment should be equivalent - net salary deductions = salary lower because of lack of reductions. However the final salary for purposes of a final salary scheme is the gross salary in the private sector scheme and that's bigger.

I don't know if things have changed since but in my day it was a rip-off and that's before consideration of the fact that establishment branch were happy to leave people stranded on top of one scale without considering the real responsibilities (as opposed to numbers of direct reports) until the letter of resignation arrived.

And finally, here is not pension pot. Public pensions - including the regular state pensions - are all Ponzi schemes. Pensions are paid as current expenditure.

"On the bright side, the housing market would drop massively in value, and might actually reach sane pricing levels"

I'm not sure about that bit. The banks and building societies would have too much to lose. Stagnate until inflation elsewhere until general inflation catches up is probably the best you could hope for. The damage was done decades ago when interest rates were kept low despite soaring house prices.

Re: Nasty tactic

Says a fully adjusted and functional member of society who posts A/C.

Re: Nasty tactic

Perhaps the A/C's local council should put planning through to have he A/C's house knocked down and something useful such as a doctor's surgery built there.

Re: Nasty tactic

"I'm not convinced that's one for planning or the builders to address"

It probably isn't but, at least as far as planning is concerned, maybe it should. Likewise I don't suppose planners will have thought "Where are all these new people going to work, how are they going to get there and have we looked at how that will affect the overall carbon footprint and sustainability of the scheme?"

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

We moved into a house that had some interesting shelf brackets. They were solid aluminium. The top and wall-facing surfaces were smooth, the opposite faces were saw-cut. Somebody had cut the end off a billet of aluminium and cut about 95% of the slice to waste. The previous owner was an aircraft mechanic at the local RAF airfield.

Re: How could they not figure out the timing?

Bu did they know they had system logs?

Re: How could they not figure out the timing?

Sounds rather all of a piece with their fix. Don't provide the servers with their own master switch, just hang a notice on the existing switch. Some places are like that.

Tribunal wonders if Microsoft has found a legal hero after pivot to copyright gambit

Re: Red herring?

That was my thought exactly. AFAIK the application, code, artistic bits and all can be downloaded from Microsoft with no restrictions. It only does something allegedly useful when the licence code is added o it. They must be getting desperate.

A simple AI prompt saved a developer from this job interview scam

Blockchain. The gift that goes on stealing.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Who knew that putting all your eggs...

"Just imagine if the UK had Digital ID hosted on AWS."

You won't need to imagine. It very likely will be.

Turns out the end of Windows 10 is good for something: The PC refresh cycle

Re: I'm sure PC sector CEOs wouldn't be going hungry without W11.

Mint* used to run fast on my decades-old maxed out at 2Gb W7-era N2600 processor netbook. Latest Devuan is a bit slower now. It's now only about twice as fast loading a browser as the I7 laptop on W10.

* Doesn't seem to like the Imagine graphics. Maybe I should try LDME but I always thinkk why LDME rather than just straight Debina?

Re: Software bloat drives useless hardware sales

Sort of. It's the other way around, really but historically Microsoft's main sales agents have been H/W vendors. I still wouldn't be surprised to find them being thrown under a bus if they don't do their job. How? A new, non-TPM2 version of W11 only available as a new sale, not as a free upgrade.

Re: Amazing, really...

If, as noted, they do it as part of their paid day job then it isn't "FOSS"

Must try harder.

Re: Time to move on

Probably also some sort of list-keeper for which the sledge-hammer will be a spreadsheet.

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Re: This seems like a "chain of custody" issue

Up to a point I agree. However, looking at it from the police PoV they would, quite reasonably I think, Have regarded the information from BT as fact and expected to get a proper witness statement of that in due course. However it sounds as if there was accumulating evidence (in the general rather than forensic sense) that something was amiss and that this was disregarded. "What if this is wrong?" is a difficult question to keep asking oneself in the course of an investigation but it is an important one, not only to avoid harm like this but also to avoid failing to find the real culprit.

The really significant failure here, however, is, on realising that harm had been done to innocent people, that nobody felt it their responsibility to be proactive in doing what they could to repair that harm. That it more important than allocating blame.

Meta convinces Blue Owl to cut $30B check for its Hyperion AI super cluster

Re: five gigawatts of total compute capacity

If the only measure you can give is the input it means the output isn't capable of being measured an in consequence you don't know what you're producing - if anything.

"set to mature in 2049 "

Somebody else's problem.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Re: Of course we all know the permanent fix

Download the Debian installer which includes the proprietary drivers and try that. The only problem is likely to be really new H/W whose drivers haven't made it onto the distro yet*. OTOH is still supports my ancient (Win 7 days) net-top with an Intel CPU that won't recognise more than 3 of the 4Gb or memory it has. It even runs the ancient Informix system I installed on it years ago. I don't know Debian is seen as "difficult" and Ubuntu "easier".

* The only problems I've personally experienced along those lines was before there was a proprietary-included installer when it would quibble about Wi-Fi. The solution was to use the wired connection to download the extras. For some reason more recent installers still quibble but it can now be ignored - I think the file of allowed channels per country is missing from the installer's boot image.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

A client of mine (engineer's supplier - think big shelves of bits of metal and counter staff in brown coats) had a fax machine into the early 2000s to take orders. He also had a modem on the back of his Unix server. If he wanted me to look at something he'd ring my mobile, tell me what the problem was and then ring off, unplug his fax and plug the modem into the fax line. My phone was one of the clamshell Nokia Communicators so I'd flip it open, dial in sort out whatever it was.

All advanced tech for its time. All outdated now. All a good deal more secure than leaving everything connected to the internet. Have things really got better?

"Sometimes you didn't, nay couldn't, leave the telex room unscarred...."

Don't just leave it there. How scathed were you?

Re: Reply-all

I suppose even then they didn't learn that messages from sales people are often unwelcomed by the recipients.

The way I read it suggested that he was the hoaxer which would be why he was fired.

Hand in your door pass at reception as you leave.