Posts by Androgynous Cow Herd

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: Skill issue

*eye roll*

If your argument for "IT's the best program in the world" is "It doesn't crash" - your bar is rather low.

I use about half the creative suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, AfterEffects) almost every day, as well as CaptureOne as a Raw Engine. I don't believe I have seen a "Crash" of any of that software in at least the last 3 years.

I have had Network Manager in Rocky Linux "Crash" just 3 days ago on a production box, and random "I don't think I want these NICs in this bond anymore" behavior within Linux multiple times RECENTLY.

Prating about "Trampling the user's freedom" makes you sound like a silly zealot. You are absolutely free to use crap software, and I am absolutely free to point out that, yes, it is crap software.

Is this all Yorkshiremen?

" I 'm 140 years old, compile my kernel every morning over my first cup of tea for the day, and edit major motion pictures from the command line . Don't tell me Linux isn't for oldsters!"

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

OMG Pick!

Never thought I'd see reference to that anywhere...

One of my earliest, learn ingest jobs was, in the 1990s, maintaining a Pick system used in royalty tracking by the music industry - by that point, the application had been ported over from minicomputer to RedHat lLnux (pre RHEL, MUST be 7.2, neither &.1 nor 7.3 supported), but in order to get the thing to print the phone book sized reports then in vogue, THAT in turn had to be grafted onto a Windows system to use the printing subsystem...because, I guess, the vendor found CUPS to be too hard.

Any firm engaged in royalty tracking or enforcement would have a subscription to the service - which came with a weekly or biweekly update of the data, delivered on tapes (DLT I think) that had to be restored into the system for the usage and licensing info for every published song in the database. IT was an enormous amount of data for the time with records that went back to the 1920s at least (one of our clients had royalties streaming to his grandchildren because he had died in the 1950s...)

I wasn''t a developer, just an admin/fledgling DBA who had this steaming pile of legacy, non-OBDC compliant crap dumped in his lap. The software was incredibly expensive, the support cost was egregious - but the underlying application from the Stone Age of computers was the sole source of truth for royalty payments that apparently was in use by most all of the entertainment industry. Because of the huge amount of data in a decidedly non-portable schema, it would not surprise me in the least to learn that it is STILL in use by the music industry -

Scammers are deepfaking voices of senior US government officials, warns FBI

"wacky uncle will be making them as a joke"

I AM that wacky uncle.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: Sheer genius!!

At a certain large technology company, at a certain campus building in the southeastern part of the US... the underpaid and under appreciated L1 support queue was housed along with a few specialty queues for business customers and escalations, tended by a roving pack of very sharp L2s

It became well known that an ordinary bag of microwave popcorn, set for a 7 minute cook cycle, would result in smoke alarms and building evacuation for at least an hour, every single time. If you were on the queue, that is an hour break, with pay.

It's weird how many otherwise tech savvy people seem to struggle with microwaving a simple bag of popcorn....shocking really!

Then the magnetron got broked.

(if you were there - you will recognize the verbiage on the sign posted...)

Dot com era crash on the cards for AI datacenter spending? It's a 'risk'

yep

was going to post much the same:

"definitely that's on the very bullish side, particularly because of what people believe will be required for AI"

You misplelled "Bullshit"

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

Re: how many

Upvoted , and to add - So a Microsoft app needs to be re-factored to run in a non-Microsoft cloud? So - what?

Some Amazon services and GCP services are unique to those platforms as well. so what? Portability between those clouds also required *gasp* refactoring!

"Refactoring is too hard" is only true until you actually scope the work. If your application is so complex that it is a MAJOR or impossible effort - then you were stupid to put it on someone else's infrastructure in the first place, the application is crap, and probably should be re-written, not re-factored. Suck it up, Buttercup...and get coding.

It's not like there is some pricing advantage to going to something else. Anyone who thinks they are going to run on AWS to save money is dangerously misinformed. Same for guarantees of uptime. Why move your thing to some other thing that was not built to run your thing?

Azure has a functionality that AWS or GCS cannot match, same as the other way around.

And the cloud is still someone else's computer that you pay too much to use.

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Re: Heating the air for telling us bad stories

You know enough to be on the right track. Power delivery itself ain't all that hard. Thermal rejection at those levels is next level black magic and a lot more failure prone that you would imagine.

And WHEN it fails, hope you can shut down the Rack/Room/Datacenter fast enough or the environment ain't gonna be worth a damn going forward.

Re: Not Enough Compute Speed?

Wait - Germanium comes from China? Why isn't it "Chinanium" then??

Re: Cloud Cuckoo Land

Upvoted for "An ouroboros of bullshit"

Dell discloses monster 20-petaFLOPS desktop built on Nvidia's GB300 Superchip

Re: Nuts

Not with 4 bit precision. It’s garbage.

Re: FP4??!!

Yup…pay attention to that number…Blackwell is a marketing ploy to make numbers that sound stunning in a sales pitch or press release, but are actually accomplished by throwing away precision that most of the pie-in-the-sky use cases for “AI”. - drug discovery, cold fusion research and other hard science stuff - actually use and rely on. It’s garbage for Math that Matters ™.

But, as noted above, if you are generating ….adult content…precision at that level does not matter.

And yeah, power, cooling etc…those were problems before the current AI hypocalypse…and that is another problem that AI or even ML cannot solve.

Microsoft blames Outlook's wobbly weekend on 'problematic code change'

On the bright side...

"ome of those looking to enjoy start-of-the-week Teams meeting to catch up with coworkers were stymied and unable to use the system"

So...not all bad news

NAND flash prices plunge amid supply glut, factory output cut

Re: Will we see any price cuts?

I disagree.

Rule #1 in storage - Only by enough to get you through the next purchase cycle.

Storage ALWAYS is cheaper if you can wait. Recent spot pricing increases in NAND were an aberation in a 30 year cycle that trended relentlessly downward.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

Wait…you mean…

“This is the year of Linux on the Desktop”?

AI agents? Yes, let's automate all sorts of things that don't actually need it

Re: "We know bad actors may try to misuse this technology."

It’s actually a warning to keep an eye on Vin Diesel.

What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?

Re: Power *and* cooling

Cooling *is * power from a density standpoint.

Lots of hand waving around latency…but no answer.

Hollow core fibre etc and good job calling out the some challenges to this approach. But I am very skeptical that the speed of light as a barrier will be overcome since light is exactly what is traveling down those fibers. Transactional speed measured in milliseconds is way, way too slow for computation at this scale. Locally, sure, Infiniband or RoCE for interconnects but that is gonna stink on ice after just a few kilometers.

Mix in high bandwidth with computational latency… usable solutions are measured in meters, not kilometers. The breakthrough that would solve that would have a far bigger impact than all the generative AI nonsense combined.

Reads more like an anal-list talking blue sky and unicorns.

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

Re: bah, humbug

In the course of reading these comments, I stopped to see if Apple Intelligence was available/enabled on this very new iPad.

Available, not enabled. So, ok I guess

I changed the Siri voice to the Irish lass while I was there, anyway. She sounds cute.

OpenZFS 2.3 is here, with RAID expansion and faster dedup

Re: I don't understand the popularity of ZFS

Oh, someone’s baby just was identified as ugly.

Re: Kitchen-Sink and Reliability

Think storage adjacent services. Tree crawlers/scanners, graphana, snapshot or replication managers or engines,

Containerizing those sorts of things isn’t a bad architecture at all. Many modern storage vendors do exactly that for their functionality, or even for the protocol stack itself…Ganesha in a container for NFS etc, FTPd or whatever in another.

But that ability is completely outside ZFS. Of four definitely not ZFS NAS storage platforms at my shop, at least 2 of them do exactly this for their various advanced functions, and other systems that have been tested here do this as well. Containerizing the various parts means an OOM instance of Samba or your whiz bang GUI doesn’t take down the whole house of cards, for example.

Re: Kitchen-Sink and Reliability

“ Because the big k8s users will pay $LOTS for it, and that is driving sales.”

Mmmmmm or so the crack marketing team would have you believe.

There are a few large ZFS implementations in the world, true enough, but those are built on the pure open source, not the commercial offerings of iX or anyone else.

TrueNAS is not an enterprise product - it is departmental at best. These stunning feature announcements in 2025 actually underscores that: “Hey, you can now expand a RAID pool (but not increase parity! Hope you enjoy those increased rebuild times as your parity thrashes harder to keep up!”) and “Hey, our Dedupe now sucks slightly less than it always has” are not super compelling

It’s referred to as “Ghetto NAS” in the storage world for a reason.

SEC sues Elon Musk for allegedly screwing investors out of $150M before Twitter takeover

Re: Did Musk/Twitter ever pay its bills ?

"Keep Austin Weird™"

Nvidia shovels $500M into Israeli boffinry supercomputer

Garbage generation

Blackwell is only faster than the previous generation of GPU because it is only 4 bit precise. 16 or 32 bit precision is unachievable with it.

If you are actually doing Math that Matters™ , Blackwell is garbage.

If you are just doing AI to magically make cat videos....it's ok.

Enterprises in for a shock when they realize power and cooling demands of AI

Re: Optimism at its finest

ohhh! Maybe with a restaurant on the roof featuring perfectly cooked steaks!!!

Even at $200/mo, Altman admits ChatGPT Pro struggles to turn a profit

I would like to take this opportunity to point out...

1. Oh, bullshit!

Infosec experts divided on AI's potential to assist red teams

“Public Benefit Corporation “

Ok, I’ll bite….how exactly does the “Public” benefit from the ability of computers to return inaccurate information if not just making shit up?

All of the handwaving around the amazing performance of the new gen of GPUs gloss over the fact that they run on an appalling low 4 bit precision level. They are worthless for any actual scientific usage, but I guess ok for making up fanfic from The Matrix or spelling straberry.

One third of adults can't delete device data

Re: A Pedant Writes

They can’t write good, you mean?

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

In mother Russia...

You don't take advantage of a TPM. A TPM takes advantage of you.

Here's how a Trump presidency could change the tech industry

nothing to see here.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Re: Hey Register: would you mind adding some technical detail

C'mon -It's 2024, almost 2025. Do the modern thing and use AI to make some shit up!

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Oh, poor Tanner

I bet he got extra time for his SATs too...

Moscow-adjacent GoldenJackal gang strikes air-gapped systems with custom malware

Re: Air-gapped

Wolfenstein 3D?

Two simple give-me-control security bugs found in Optigo network switches used in critical manufacturing

HAPPY CYBERSECURITY MONTH!!

have some cake!

World Wide Web Foundation closes so Tim Berners-Lee can spend more time with his protocol

"what a database of social graph data might look like"

most of them are full of cat videos.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund throws cash at FreeBSD and Samba

Re: Freakin' SAMBA!

Because definitely NOT million dollar Tuxera *licensed* the important stuff from Microsoft. I sh!t you not. They aren't trying to reverse engineer or emulate the critical bits of the protocol.

I don't know if Thursby also licensed some code from Microsoft to ensure interoperability for AD, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Congrats on saving those critical files with the tools available to you. I'm not saying SAMBA doesn't work for very small values of "Work". it's slow and would choke on anything resembling a modern SMB implementation (Multichannel, SMBoRDMA, la la la) but for a simple task from a rescue disk, sure, that's one way to do it.

And for those downvoters who just don't like that I called their open sores baby ugly. Get over it. The baby is stupid too.

Freakin' SAMBA!

"the work contributes to the reliability and performance of Samba and makes it compatible with the latest protocols"

By the time this development has reached any meaningful stability and relevance, the goalposts will have moved again.

Microsoft drives SMB. SAMBA has been forever playing catchup on a very complicated file protocol against a multi billion dollar company who got a giant head start and increased it over time. SAMBA has always sucked, it continues to suck, and when those "Latest protocols" finally make it into the offering, not only will they not be the latest protocols any more...they will, in all likelihood, suck.

Open source is great until the mission is to closely emulate someone's multi gazillion dollar commercial offering.

IF you just must have SMB so those FreeBSD desktops can co-exist in a Microsoft world, the commercial stack from Tuxera would be the way to go. It absolutely does NOT suck...good ACL structure, the full feature set of SMB 3 including multi-channel for actual high performance, and excellent stability.

But if you are a deadly serious about FreeBSD (or Linux, frankly) - just use NFS. It's lighter, higher performance if mounted properly, and best of all,it keeps the Windows users out of your network shares!

a "loo"

is a room with a water closet ("toilet", commode) in it.

A "Bathroom" contains the additional plumbing to bathe.

AI bills can blow out by 1000 percent: Gartner

Re: No, seriously?

Comparing Gartner to common bullshit is denigrating the value of bullshit.