Posts by Doctor Syntax 42272 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
It sounds like a bit of both. It sounds as if Snap is creating a new $SNAP_USER_DATA for each update to VSCode. It's not necessarily a s trash problem because whatever else gets written in there is abandoned on every update so even without the trash directory being in there it's going to keep filling the drive, just more slowly.
Fair enough.
I suppose I should have made more clear that I'm basing it on a recognition at government or board level that the present situation is risky. This is, after all the premise of TFA.
I'd hope that anyone in the UK government would, for instance, assume at least the possibility that anything they write or discuss, any spreadsheets they prepare, any presentations they put together using any US-owned cloud could get back to anyone in the US government who wants to know and start from there. On that basis the person advocating Microsoft 365 is not only not bringing a solution, they are part of the problem.
One of the features of the US constitution is that it combines head of government and head of state. In general countries with a PM or the like as head of government that position depends on being able to put together a Parliamentary majority and, although having some power of patronage in appointing ministers the PM depends on continuing support. They can't go off in their own direction with the elected representatives at best trailing behind trying to stop them. And they're unlikely to have got to that position without having had at least some experience in government or, after a long period in opposition, of at least shadowing one or more ministerial positions.
Another is the way the judiciary is appointed. If I read news reports of a Supreme Court decision from the US it will very often say which President appointed them. If I read something similar from the UK there'd be no similar comment. Lord Chancellor is a member of the government of the day but the rest of the judiciary as appointments on merit, not political appointees. Admittedly recent UK governments have seemed to chafe under the restraints of an independent judiciary but at least it's a sign that it works. The US Supreme Court, by contrast, seems to have given even ex-Presidents a get out of jail free card for whatever they might have done.
"you can use any OS or software ... because after set up, it never connects to the outside world again"
Not if it's subscription software, you can't. It will check to see if its licence has been renewed. Given the trend of commercial software to move to a subscription model this limits choice.
The Anglosphere is looking more than a little worse for wear these days. It was a handy construct for the US to wield when it suited them to have a few largely Anglophone countries to support them. It required the participants to believe in it. Clearly the US no longer does. It's now just a collection of the former components who must build their alliances - or not - as they see fit. It would need a lot of effort to build the trust needed to put it back together, along with a forgetting of the basic US foreign policy of having interests, not allies.
What Trump has done is to remind us of what was always the case.
There is clearly nothing in the way the US runs its affairs to prevent someone like Trump getting to the top again. There's also the old say that the us doesn't have allies, it has interests - didn't that one come from a former US President?
It was always foolish to get into this dependency position whatever the nature of the US government. What Trump has done is to alert people to that folly.
The unpleasant truth is so many people have "invested" so much in being able to put up with MS that there will be a plethora of "reasons" why any individual outfit can't switch.
The people with "reasons" need to be reminded that people who bring solutions are more highly valued within an organisation than those who bring problems.
I'd like el Reg to provide us with an update on the Danish switch - maybe a summary of the various European moves away from MS. Liam?
In the meantime I was struck by reading in another place that those Excel wizards are seen in some instances as a block to overall process improvement. Attempts to provide some sort of integrated workflow get stuck when someone who refuses to move from the hugely complex spreadsheets they use (which suggests to me a pretty bad bus factor in the whole operation).
Migrating to non-MS S/W should see this as an opportunity, not a problem. Introduce the new workflow bypassing the obstruction with a replacement application on the basis that the spreadsheet won't work an longer and no, we're not making exceptions. The obstruction's role is now redundant and they can either take up a new role or discuss redundancy terms.
Without all the screaming, I also disagree.
What governments can do and should is specify local ownership and management as a requirement for systems running critical or sensitive services, both for their own use and for critical infrastructure providers. Another thing they can and should do is recruit sufficient staff able to manage the contracts if they are outsourced or to bring operation in-house if appropriate.
Quoting myself from a recent thread.
It matters a good deal less on who makes the S/W than who controls the service that runs on it. The hierarchy is:
The service
The software
The hardware
The main risk is having services provided by businesses under extra-territorial control. The risk with S/W is the subscription model moving it up into the service tier. The hardware is mostly not a problem except possibly appliances such as routers and firewalls with embedded software.
"both the UK and EU still happily allow the brightest and best such companies to be bought out by overseas competitors, and there is very little in place to prevent that from happening."
Having being European owned and managed as its USP would provide a good deal of protection. A potential buyer would have to view the non-sovereign potential as outweighing the prompt loss of the existing customer base.
Go back and read the title of TFA. "We" is ourselves and fellow Europeans in this context. And note that "Europeans" covers more than the EU. Yes, there may be Anglophone countries with common interests too. Canada certainly has common interests in this although Quebec wouldn't thank you for calling them Anglophone.
"organizations scramble to buy AI-optimized servers and supporting infrastructure"
Why?
What they should be scrambling to bout is H/W optimised for the line of business applications that they've moved to foreign owned cloud purveyors. Given that they've been running such applications without AI for years and given the low ROI being reported for AI the priorities should be clear. If - and it's a big if - AI still looks worthwhile once they've done that, then they can look to adding AI-optimised servers.
"Well that'll Starmer. He's the idiot obsessed with AI and pushing it into everything."
He doesn't have a monopoly on it. Just about everyone in politics is doing it. FOMO plus a strong helping of "if you don't understand it it must be magic and we must have magic".
Maybe things aren't quite a bad as you think. I went there last year. There were huge car parks near the centre and still a lot of driving round to find a spare slot. Also, being right next to a junction on the M1 the surrounding area has a lot of business parks. Maybe too many on greenfield sites down towards Hoyland.
When that bubble bursts there's going to be a lot of slack manufacturing capacity, unsold stock and even surplus stuff installed, some of it possibly in DCs that weren't even turned on because they didin't get a grid connection.
And even at best memory prices have a habit of being cyclic - high prices, build out production - glut - close fabs - shortage - high prices.
"how can they achieve digital sovereignty under private cloud providers Dell and HPE, who are also American companies"
By not using AI although it matters a good deal less on who makes the S/W than who controls the service that runs on it. The hierarchy is:
The service
The software
The hardware
The main risk is having services provided by businesses under extra-territorial control. The risk with S/W is the subscription model moving it up into the service tier. The hardware is mostly not a problem except possibly appliances such as routers and firewalls with embedded software.
This is where FOSS come in. It allows for user choice about who runs the service and avoids the subscription risk.
The best interview I ever had had only one question: "Are you still interested?" Of course I'd previously been body-shopped into them for a couple of years. When I went freelance I got most of my work through word of mouth. Even without that an aggressive interview approach would have been a warning that this is probably a sample of the company culture. In an interview the employer is being examined by the interviewee as well as the other way around.
There are schemes which are supposed to work with encrypted data. Presumably they're computationally expensive as you say. But the application is going to need the keys and they will either be stored on the host system, and hence vulnerable, or provided by the client and vulnerable in transit. That just makes illegal access more difficult but not impossible.
