* Posts by JacobZ

185 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Nov 2014

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IBM shifts remaining US-based AIX dev jobs to India – source

JacobZ

Re: IBM

"Fortunately, I don't deal with L3 and developers for AIX any more (at least in my current role), so I won't have to face the problems of describing a difficult problem to someone for whom English is not their first language"

On the plus side, at least you would be describing it to somebody with a broader worldview than an American.

You might also get exposed to some lovely contributions to the English language originating in that part of a world, for example "prepone", said when bringing a meeting forward.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

JacobZ

Re: A gummy printer?

A whole new twist on the old "this chewing gum tastes terrible" joke. (If you don't know the joke, ask an old person).

Quantum entanglement discovery could enable futuristic comms tech, Nuclear physicists say

JacobZ

I don't know if that was supposed to be funny? If it was serious, it is wrong in every important way.

US Dept of Energy set to reveal fusion breakthrough

JacobZ

Re: Might now be 20 years away

"Lots of unnecessary pessimism about this topic among all comments. It will be just one step at a time and it will take years."

ITYM "necessary pessimism" since we all agree that this just one step and it will take years. By contrast, the mainstream press is going gaga over this, wildly overstating it's significance - it's a milestone, not a breakthrough - so realistic pushback (not cynicism) is entirely appropriate.

IBM to fire Watson IoT Platform from its cloud

JacobZ

Watson

Hmmm, maybe sticking the Watson brand on unrelated offerings isn't a magic guarantee of success after all.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

JacobZ

Firing all the wrong people

I'm sure that Elon's strategy of firing anybody who proves that they know what they are doing is going to work out just fine. [/sarcasm, for the hard of thinking in the back of the room]

And for all those people saying "don't be insurbordinate": none of this would happen if Elon had not criticized their work *very publicly* while at the same time being *very wrong*. Whenever somebody wrongly criticized my work to an audience, I always defended it to the same audience. Instead of proclaiming nonsense from the top of the mountain Elon should have asked privately and internally what the issue was; and then tweeted something like "According to my head of infra, the slowness is caused by ... and we are looking into fixes."

As for employability: hell yes I would absolutely hire these people. Deferring to job titles and the Highest Paid Person in the room (aka the Hippo) is how projects die.

Intel’s axed Optane biz spurts out mixed bag of new SSDs

JacobZ

Prices?

How long do we have to wait for clearance sales on remaining Optane stock? I can always use a decently fast SSD with high endurance, especially as my older SSDs are reaching the ends of their lifetimes.

Intel plans to cut products — we guess where they’ll happen

JacobZ

Software

Anything software will be on the block, especially if it can't show that it promotes sales of Intel - and only Intel - silicon. For example DAOS; technically it's open source so somebody else could pick it up, but Intel will stop staffing it.

Intel has little patience and even less success with software at the best of times, and these are very much not the best of times.

JacobZ

Re: alternative architectures

Another reason for the failure of Itanium is that while it was being developed, x86 processors got very good indeed at optimizing instruction throughput with out-of-order execution, speculative branching, and other clever "tricks". Those same optimizations turn out to be extremely difficult to achieve with the Itanium architecture. This in large part is what Knuth's comment was getting at.

This reply on StackOverflow gets into more of the details: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1011760/what-are-the-technical-reasons-behind-the-itanium-fiasco-if-any

Google kills forthcoming JPEG XL image format in Chromium

JacobZ

Anti-SLAPP for patents Re: Are google planning on pushing AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) instead ?

Sounds like you are advocating for a Patent equivalent of the anti-SLAPP process that exists in many US states as a fast and effective deterrent to abusive libel or slander suits.

A SLAPP lawsuit is one where the abuser hopes to shut down criticism because the other party cannot afford the expensive and lengthy legal process to defend their freedom of speech. Anti-SLAPP laws provide a rapid resolution of obviously abusive lawsuits with, in many cases, costs imposed on the plaintiff.

Something similar for patents would allow people to quickly and cheaply challenge obviously flawed patents, and again penalize the patent holder if, for example, they failed to disclose well-known prior art in their patent application.

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

JacobZ

Add her to the list

The creator of computer science, the founder of modern systems programming, the founder of business-oriented programming, the inventor of assembly language, the list goes on and on.

Google's Alphabet to review every project after $6bn decline in profits

JacobZ

Parkinson's Law predicted this

The bigger the company, the higher the overhead of management, admin processes, unnecessary meetings, bureaucracy, power politics, etc. etc.

Google is encountering the same diminishing returns on hiring that every other company since the modern corporation has suffered, as documented decades ago in Parkinson's Law. We greybeards could have told them that, if they hadn't replaced us all with younger digital natives.

How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix

JacobZ

Smart

As well as being honest, this is the kind of openness and frankness that the open source community need to see if they are ever to trust Citrix again. After all, nobody smart would trust Citrix with a future freemium model if they didn't believe it had learned lessons from Xen.

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

JacobZ

Who talks like this?

Do marketing people in tech have any idea how weird they sound when they write or say these things? Can they not sound like an authentic human being?

“Intel is committed to driving innovation to benefit users, and our entry-level processor families have been crucial for raising the PC standard across all price points,” Josh Newman, VP and interim general manager of Mobile Client Platforms at Intel, said in a canned statement.

And my absolute favorite:

“This update streamlines brand offerings across PC segments to enable and enhance Intel customer communication on each product’s value proposition, while simplifying the purchasing experience for customers,” the chipmaker explained.

The word "explained" is doing a lot of work there...

Microsoft Outlook sends users back to 1930 with (very) mini-Millennium-Bug glitch

JacobZ

Re: AHEM!

Many early databases also stored the date as two digits (or at least defaulted to that - Oracle 6 and earlier, I think?). Consequently, you ended up with windowing logic in the application itself in order to slide the 100 year range available to the coder to an application-appropriate window.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

JacobZ

Re: "the only person in England who never had to take a driving test" ?

Yes, and: a number of people who drove army vehicles in World War II were "grandfathered in" to a civvie license when they were demobbed, without ever taking a test.

(On a related note, Elizabeth drove an army ambulance during the war, although I assume they didn't let the heir to the throne near anything too dangerous.)

Goodbye, humans: Call centers 'could save $80b' switching to AI

JacobZ

Re: But they already do...

Several of the companies I deal with as a consumer identify all of this almost instantly from my caller id. You don't need an AI or even a chatbot for that. AmEx is an example of actually doing this right.

JacobZ
FAIL

Not saving at all

By "save $80B" they mean "push $80B in costs onto the customer, who will pay for it in wasted time, increased frustration, abandoned attempts to get help with problems, and failing to get billing problems resolved".

Arm sues Qualcomm over custom Nuvia CPU cores, wants designs destroyed

JacobZ

Not looking good for Qualcomm

If it's true, as ARM claims, that Qualcomm initially acknowledged the restrictions and said it would stop using the Nuvia designs, it's going to be hard for them to argue otherwise now.

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

JacobZ

Correct

In particular, there is a law *very specific* to New York state that says if somebody repays a loan you have every right to assume they did so intentionally. And in this case, the loan was repaid to the penny so the lenders (there were several) rationally assumed that the borrower had refinanced, shrugged, and went with it.

JacobZ
Headmaster

Massive Nope

Not even remotely the same.

In general the law (in many jurisdictions) very clearly says that if you receive money that is obviously not yours and obviously a mistake, you don't get to keep it.

In the case you are referencing, a borrower accidentally paid back a loan it was owed, and the very specific law in New York state says that if somebody mistakenly pays you what they owe you and you reasonably believe it was intentional, you don't have to undo their mistake.

So completely different.

ALSO - *both* parties in that case were rich and powerful, which completely undercuts your so-called point.

Micro Focus bought by Canada's OpenText for $6b

JacobZ

Highgate Cemetery

So many great names lie buried under Micro Focus. It is the Highgate Cemetery of software companies.

Microsoft finds critical hole in operating system that for once isn't Windows

JacobZ

Re: org.chromium.cras[s] indeed!

"nobody seems to recognise the need to use it with proper forethought"

As Tony Hoare famously said, "A programming language designer should be responsible for the mistakes made by programmers using the language." This goes double for mistakes _commonly_ made even by experienced programmers.

"Programmers should be better" is no solution; programming is hard enough already, and no human being can sustain a consistently high degree of vigilance especially when working under time pressure. Good languages - and their supporting tool chains - should take whatever burden then can off of programmers.

(And yes, there are good reasons for why C is the way it is, mainly to do with performance and compactness and the limitations of the tools available at the time.)

Dinobabies latest: IBM settles with widow of exec who killed himself after layoff

JacobZ
Holmes

Funnily enough...

...de-aging the work force never seems to apply to the CEO and other senior execs, where extensive experience is considered a plus.

Businesses confess: We pass cyberattack costs onto customers

JacobZ

Newsflash

I hate to break this to you, but eventually companies pass _all_ costs onto customers.

That's how business works.

Intel tried selling software before. Will it succeed this time?

JacobZ

Deja vu all over again

Intel has had many forays into software - remember it's stewardship of Lustre, for example, which was decidely... uh... lackluster? And every time it fails for the same reason: ultimately, Intel cares only about selling hardware.

And you can't make good software unless your goal is to make good software. So Intel always ends up making software that is neither good in its own right nor good at driving hardware sales. Then it loses patience, throws the software business out, and after a couple of years repeats the cycle. Prediction: DAOS will be next to be thrown out of the boat.

1.9m patient records exposed in healthcare debt collector ransomware attack

JacobZ
Facepalm

The root cause here...

...is that there is such a thing as "healthcare debt", and therefore "healthcare debt collectors".

The first and best protection against security issues is to minimize the attack surface. Not only does the American health care system provide the worst care at the highest cost, and bankrupt people for reasons beyond their control, it also creates this entire class of security risks that simply should not exist.

IBM settles age discrimination case that sought top execs' emails

JacobZ
Coat

Re: I'm shocked, I tell you...

Data are my favorite character in Star Wars!

IBM-powered Mayflower robo-ship once again tries to cross Atlantic

JacobZ
Joke

Chico Marx explains why...

...it's taking so many attempts.

https://youtu.be/eaX1gVMkoj0

Logitech Lift: Vertical mouse for those with small hands

JacobZ

Will try it.

I have small hands.

Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims

JacobZ

Words matter...

"Rometty in 2017 earned was paid $1.6m in salary and $5m in AIP compensation"

FTFY

Cringe: Salesforce latest megacorp to jump on non-fungible tokens bandwagon

JacobZ

Translation, please

"Winners will move past NFTs as simply collectable to find greater utility through the token"

Translation: "We don't actually know why anybody would pay money for one of these yet, but we're sure we'll figure out sometime soon".

Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension

JacobZ

Thank you Re: HD radio

No apologies needed. Obscure historical dead ends in the evolution of tech are always fascinating and *never* a waste of time.

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

JacobZ

Re: One doesn't imply the other

"As far as I understand it (thirty seconds on Google), Jeopardy gives you an answer and you have to respond with the correct question. This likely isn't that hard to do if you have a fast processor and access to a massive data set."

Not to be rude, but you really don't understand it very well. Jeopardy questions/answers are very hard to figure out, often more like crossword clues than pub trivia, and the best humans are highly regarded for both their knowledge and skill. And Watson, like the best human players, was also really good at introspecting on how confident it was of its answer, and therefore whether to take the risk of buzzing in (Jeopardy penalizes for wrong answers).

It really did take a lot of work to get Watson to the point where it could not only win the game but also avoid making a fool of itself (early iterations were sometimes hilariously bad).

The problem with Watson's Jeopardy win is that Watson achieved something very difficult... that did not translate into anything financially valuable in the real world. It solved a problem that nobody had.

JacobZ

Re: Speaking of diagnoses...

IBM: "What are you supposed to do with a sick Healthcare AI?"

Watson: "You think that's bad - what are you supposed to do if you *are* a sick Healthcare AI?"

(with apologies to Douglas Adams)

Joint European Torus celebrates 100,000 pulses: Neither Brexit nor middle age has stopped '80s era experiment

JacobZ
Coat

40 years in the making

So we're only 10 years from commercial fusion power then.

When product names go bad: Microsoft's Raymond Chen on the cringe behind WinCE

JacobZ

Re: Vixen

And for completeness, the word in question has cognates in the Nordic languages, and of course in English as the F in WTF.

MongoDB logs 50% hike in Q4 sales, beats analysts forecasts for next quarter

JacobZ
Holmes

Revenue is easy, profit is hard.

Any idiot can make revenue selling dollars for fifty cents.

The problem comes, to borrow a phrase, when you run out of other people's money to spend.

IBM tells POWER8 owners: The end is nigh for upgrades

JacobZ

Thanks

I worked in IBM for 15 years without learning that. I guess I should have stuck it out for another five.

Nothing to see here, says IBM, Redbooks are still a thing. Move along please

JacobZ

PR weaselry at its finest

Read the IBM statements carefully. They are entirely consistent with the original plan to move all internal staff to "other projects" and to produce Red Books using external contractors. PR weaselry at its finest.

The resulting Red Books will, of course, be complete crap, and will come at the cost of doubling the effort required from the IBM SMEs who create and check the meat of the content - and, I suspect, many of those SMEs will be exactly the same IBM Garage people who were previously professionally producing the old Red Books that customers loved so much.

HPE picks Taiwan as 'global strategic hub for next-generation technology'

JacobZ
Joke

HPE loves political troublespots

First Texas, now Taiwan. I'm not sure which is the bigger strategic risk.

CentOS Stream^W^W Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 emerges in beta form

JacobZ
Alert

RHEL 8 was the Windows Vista of Linux distros. Even the upgrade paths from various minors of RHEL 7 was a PITA.

Let's hope RHEL 9 migration is smoother.

Google deliberately throttled ad load times to promote AMP, claims new court document

JacobZ

Wait...

I'm not sure that "ads load faster" is the killer benefit that Google seems to think it is.

NFTs not annoying enough? Now they come with wallet-emptying malware

JacobZ

Armed robot dogs

Very bad news for self-driving cars

'Extraordinary' pigs step in to protect Schiphol airport from marauding geese

JacobZ
Coat

The pigs only have three legs

...you have to know the joke.

Big Blue's quantum rainmaker jumps to room-temp diamond quantum accelerator company

JacobZ
FAIL

Disappointed in El Reg sub-eds

Missed opportunity for a Quantum Leap headline.

With Alphabet's legendary commitment to products, we can't wait to see what its robotics biz Intrinsic achieves

JacobZ
Facepalm

Apocalypse

Google will kill this program in about three years.

Because the one thing the robot apocalypse really needs is orphaned robots.

‘Fasten your seat belts, raise your tray table, and disconnect your Bluetooth headsets from the entertainment unit’

JacobZ
Facepalm

10 inches of screen?

So 10 inches of screen room and 8 inches of legroom.

They think it's all over. It's not now: US judge rejects HPE motion to have Oracle's Solaris sueball dismissed

JacobZ

Or don't

Seriously, don't become a corporate lawyer. Every single one I have ever met has been completely miserable and regrets their career choice.

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