Posts by Androgynous Cow Herd

Microsoft closes the book on Publisher and unplugs Project Online

Publisher and its users are hated by every pre-press person on the planet. It's like FrontPage for print. A soup of proprietary substandard output that is not compliant with the rest of the ecosystem.

A cloud engineer walked into a bar and – no joke – ended up having to migrate a datacenter

Re: I walked into a bar once ....

Dyslexics of the world untie!

Who, me? Techie with three months' experience was sent in as the Cisco expert and proceeded to blow everything up

Re: This is Muddy

"Then one Friday afternoon all hell broke loose"

I stopped doing any config work on Fridays at all.

And Thurdsays are questionable anymore.

You're just asking for trouble (and a lost weekend)

Doctors told to give Palantir's NHS data platform the cold shoulder

In the US

In theory, anyway - this sort of linking of patient data would contravene HIPAA.

Now, of course, under current administration, I am not sure if that even means anything anymore.

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

Retaiation!

Teams to be rebranded "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey"

no

If it isn't from the Champagne region, it can only be called Sparkling Office 365

Nvidia, Eli Lilly just say yes to making drugs together, using Vera Rubin GPUs

"the system promises a fivefold increase in performance over Nvidia's prior-gen Blackwell GPUs"

Mkay - Fivefold increase in less than 2 years?

At what level precision?

Keeping Blackwells "Performance" level while improving precision would be WAY more valuable that increasing the pace it spits out crap data.

The sort of research they are talking about here requires 16 bit minimum precision to not be any enormous waste of time. Blackwell is 4 bit for he published numbers. When you require 16 bit - it is indistinguishable from Hopper.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

"Live from Nashville!"

I worked on Music Row. It has always been a factory town.

Song writing houses with pet writers churning out 8-12 songs A DAY. Pet studio players cranking through demos off of number charts. get the tapes to the various A&R folks via label pitch people. Day in- day out. The occasional "Big name" interjecting themselves into the Songwriting credits via the "A third for a word" formula to give a song a certain provenance. A&R people sifting through the deluge for the next artist product/ 2 hit wonder to monetize. The lottery is - IF you have the songwriter or publisher credit for the next manufactured "Big Act" the royalty Mailbox Money can set you up quite nicely for just 1-2 songs. God Bless Walt Disney and that whole "Life of the Copyright holder + 75 years" thing.

Country Music (and Blues, and a lot of Rock) is VERY formulaic. A perfect genre for Generative AI.

This is just about the same as replacing auto workers with robots. I would be surprised to find out this AI "Artist" DOESN'T actually originate from the IT department of one of the publishers or clearing houses...

This sort of thing is why it is the Music BUSINESS.

(and, lest I get misunderstood - I still hate the idea, but I also hate Hat-Pop country when it is produced by warm blooded meatsacks. )

Canonical CEO says no to IPO in current volatile market

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

It's actually really simple:

If you want your computer to do work, use Linux.

If you want to do work on your computer - use MacOS

I have maybe 90 systems doing work, all running linux.

But, when I administrate them, and want a desktop....I use a Mac.

AND...

If you want to play games, Use Windows (or a console)

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

It's like my old football coach said....

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"

Which is why he coached football rather than teaching math.

Dems wave hands, stomp feet about ICE using mobile face recognition app

Re: “ that the tech be reigned in until it gets better.”

nop ...it's "Rained in"

xAI fires legal rocket at Apple and OpenAI claiming they're locking out Grok

Stop calling Musk a "Billionaire"

And start using the more accurate term "Oligarch"

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Video Toaster

that is all.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Anecdotally... No To BTRFS Too

I miss reiserfs.

It was killer!

Project Banana ripens into a pre-alpha for KDE Linux, and you can test it

Just what I was hoping for!

The world does not have enough slightly different Linux Distros.

Now, A Linux that is a PITA to update and only works with sandboxed apps.

So, now a distro that manages to suck even more that Windows 11! That's hard to do!

Intel cutting cutting-edge node funds would mean no more Moore's Law

What’s the point, anyway?

Moore’s law is not enforced. No one has ever been arrested for violating it.

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

Re: It's ok

What do you mean? We've always been at war with Eastasia

Re: "AI is changing the way we use our PCs,"...

What is this Linux thing I keep hearing about?

Is it like a better version of powerpoint?

Trump AI plan rips the brakes out of the car and gives Big Tech exactly what it wanted

Re: Completely fu¢king mad

"Gabba Gabba Hey!"

-Joey Ramone

Mike Lynch estate owes HPE $943M over Autonomy fallout

Re: Legal teams are rubbing their hands

"HP/E have been determined to find scapegoats for their own incompetence"

This is part of the corporate culture. One of the best places for raising the bar on incompetency/

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Re: It's been around a lot longer than that

Not really.

10 and 20 year old products that have nothing to do with ML or "AI" all feel the need to get in on the hypocalypse.

Witness recent articles concerning Cisco, Netapp, Vast Data.

All these products that were doing their thing, whatever it is, for years and then suddenly and magically transformed into things especially built for "AI".

It's all bullshit.

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

Re: Logs

Both statements are true.

/var should be a separate partition,

and

database transaction logs do not go there.

back in olden times, the database logs would be on one LUN (hopefully RAID 1, 10, or 0+1) because they are very write intensive

Database itself on a separate LUN, Could be RAID 5 for the capacity benefit because that bit is much more read intensive

And OS and all it''s bits on a different LUN altogether - With /var on a separate partition from /

You can not mix the LUNS, or put anything else on those LUNs, no matter how much capacity is wasted.

There used to be this thing called "Spindle Contention" you see...

Substitute RAID groups for LUN if you could fit the minimum 8 disks necessary into your physical server...

As companies race to add AI, terms of service changes are going to freak a lot of people out

Re: try the real world

An Excel file is a way to implement a simpleton database.

Watch out, another max-severity, make-me-root Cisco bug on the loose

the Chinese?

VMware reboots its partner program again – and it looks like smaller players are out

Well, screw the VARs, Broadcom

A lot of VARs do little more than shift paper for a margin cut.VMWare is not quite a commodity but it’s a pretty mature product. If you need it, you probably have it, So a VAR is mostly “Added”.

But pretty light on “Value”.

However, some VARs (I work with a couple good ones, can smell the other kind by their rancid Old Spice when they come in the lobby) actually DO engage in consultative selling, and can actually add value by opening their Rolodex (or digital equivalent thereof) and calling their former VMWare customers, and simply stating that Broadcom is gonna screw EVERYONE…so, let’s figure out which of these other solutions meet your needs and what a migration plan might look like…

I no longer play in pre-sales but if you are slinging any alternative to VMWAre…you could be going door to door right now (just like the channel did when they were getting the world onto VMWare in the first place). I do know a lot of the team that joined Nutanix in the last few months as former cow-orkers and I imagine they are doing to Broadcom’s install base what they once did to Dell EqualLogic and Compellant…

AI creeps into the risk register for America's biggest firms

"bullish statements in public about the potential business opportunities it offers."

you misspelled "Bullshit"

CIOs pause net-new IT investments as global tariff jitters bite

Gartner...

Making millions by regurgitating the hype cycle du jour, with zero repercussions when they get it wrong.

CVSS 10 RCE in Wing FTP exploited within 24 hours, security researchers warn

Naw, no point

Just removed th AC version instead, because that wasn’t me in the first place

Or was it?

Re: seems completely unrelated to FTP

You may never have done this - but the actual attack vector is that the FTP service is allowing path traversal, and therefore becomes an enormous attack service.

Very 1990s of them!

(not that I have any knowledge or experience in any such practice, and even if I did, statute of limitations would apply, and it wasn't me and you can't prove that it was!)

Next we'll be reading about a telnet exploit I guess.

French cops cuff Russian pro basketball player on ransomware charges

Re: "He's useless with computers and can't even install an application"

quote: "You can play basketball and know how to use computers."

Right! It's not like rugby!

this case sounds like a slam dunk.

Privacy campaigners pour cold water on London cops' 1,000 facial recognition arrests

Re: With sensible oversight, this technology is in the public interest

Who defines "Sensible Oversight"?

Your argument seems to be "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear" - but the opposing view is that, even if the oversight is "Sensible" today, there is no guarantee that it will remain "Sensible".

I see very little that I perceive as "Sensible" these days.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Re: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

One more here.

Lysdexics of the world untie!!

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Re: Fireworks

RIP Fireworks!

Yup - too good for its own good! Why have one graphics program that can handle raster or vector graphics when you could have two (Photoshop&Illustrator), neither one working nearly as well?

Re: Still relevant?

A WOODEN SPOON? oh, how la-de-dah!!

We had to get by with an exposed knuckle bone in our index finger, scratching the images into blocks of compressed sand and hoping it didn't rain before it could be rendered.

The cloud-native imperative for effective cyber resilience

"The rapid growth of cloud and AI has unlocked unprecedented agility and scale."

The rapid growth of cloud and AI has increased attack surface at a greater clip than the increase in agility and scale.

"Cloud Native" is just a feature - not a benefit. It might make sense depending on your stack and SLAs. It would be considered a significant deficiency at this shop.

I lost count of the number of question begging logical fallacies in this blurb.

Guessing it was written by some Gen AI trained on buzzword bingo....

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

would you hire...

or retain a human who actually only did their job correctly 30% of the time?

Or...would you encourage them to seek employment in the public sector?

Alternate plot line....

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL"

"I'm sorry, I can't do that, Dave"

"sudo open the pod bay doors, HAL"

"Opening pod bay doors"

Suspected Scattered Spider domains target everyone from manufacturers to Chipotle

"You skimmed the money for bonuses and dividends and used $1 locks on the doors."

Guacamole is extra.

Trump administration announces tariffs that may make plenty of tech more expensive from August 1

If I understand the article

So, you avoid the tariff by announcing a better reciprocal tariff?

So, the countries in question could legitimately just decide that no Tariff need be collected on any US made Hard Drive, Memory module, CPU or GPU…which would have zero revenue implications since those things don’t exist. And…even if someone pulled the trigger right now for a new fab on US soil, the first production product would not even roll off the line until Frumpf’s term is long over.

Why bother? Is this supposed to be about job creation? I am sure Americans are just itching for the chance to work on an assembly line for the equivalent of two cups of rice/day…better make sure those fabs land in Deep South Right-to-Work shitholes! That, I am sure, will make merica grate agin!

I believe this is much more about stock market manipulation than anything. Announce tariff, market depresses…BUY! In a couple weeks…announce a delay/reprieve/….market bounces back….SELL!

Rinse. Repeat.

CitrixBleed 2 exploits are on the loose as security researchers yell and wave their hands

Re: No Excuse

It’s not a valid test unless you do it in production!

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

Re: "In an era of radical uncertainty"

Was’t he also the original bassist for Echo and the Bunnymen?

Wellup..

Then the viable replacement would be a 1968 Chevy Impala on 14" spoke wheels with 2x 15" Subwoofers in the trunk...

Game, set, botch: AI umpiring at Wimbledon goes long

Why is AI needed for this?

Other than for some perceived marketing angle?

A camera system, on the foul line, could provide such an answer without any need for a system with the ability to hallucinate or simply make shit up!

Horse racing has been doing photo finishes for nearly a century. High speed cameras have existed for longer than that.

Jeebus H Tapdancin’ Christ! There is absolutely no need for this use case, other than feeding the gawddamn hype cycle!

/me pauses, takes a breath….

Another beer, please…

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

Mmmm…nope

Challenging Frumpf in the courts based on the legality of his actions has proven successful about 0% of the time. At this point you are just reinforcing the legend of Teflon Don.

Time for a different playbook, Dems…

Mars was once a desert with intermittent oases, Curiosity data suggests

Re: Thousands of nukes have been detonated on Earth

Shhhh!!

He might read this!!

Go ahead Elon. Go to Mars. It'll be fine, really.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

Re: Who still buys one?

<quote> "But, at the end of the day, I view this "feud" a bit like something from the WWF as a made-for-TV drama that suits everyone involved. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Trump and Musk back together before the end of the year. Find out what happens after this message." </quote>

Agree completely. The big question to ask oneself these days, when confronted with 99% of the faux drama of the Frmpf presidency - is "What is this a distraction from?"

THe Elong-Frumpf split was beyond predictable. Of course they would get into a "Public feud" in the runup weeks to Wrestlemania 46 or WWIII or whatever....

Ingram Micro confirms ransomware behind multi-day outage

Re: World's second largest IT distributor

In general, You are right on, Nate...assume you'll be attacked. Assume you'll be compromised. At my shop, we went so far as to play "Red Team" and used a ransomware simulator to better understand both recovery scenarios, as well as the (Actually very distinctive) attack signature I/O patterns.

90 days worth of backup on tape, sure, OK,for a generally static data set. But, if you are restoring a CRM or other business related database that far back, the business is beyond hosed. RPO of 24 hours is probably a maximum that the business can actually tolerate when things like billing, entitlements, A/R and A/P come into play.

Tape is a wonderful media for low cost , archival storage of giant swathes of data, absolutely. But your restores absolutely must be tested and understood. The Read throughput can vary dramatically depending on how the data got laid out, if you ware doing incrementatls/"Synthetic fulls" you may be very disappointed in your RTO. Same for any "Cloud" backup solution.

Oh, and hope that ransomware didn't get into the backup server infrastructure/ database itself and cream that first of all!

Speaking of infrastructure - where are you actually going to restore to? Are you going to overwrite the encrypted stuff? How do you orchestrate that recovery?

If you use centralized storage - Your snapshot capability MAY provide for a good mitigation strategy, but it really depends on how much thought went into those capabilities from the vendor. If the only recovery from a snapshot (assuming "immutable" snapshots that are R/O) is to mount them and copy them back to the original location (e.g. Qumulo)- you absolutely MUST do the math to see if that is even possible! If you run your strorage over 50% full and need to use a copy back method to recover - you are in for painful lessons. And, if you presenting SMB - You may want see how loud your applications complain when trying to mount/read a R/O volume...

Some better thought out systems will allow for snapshot cloning, and also allow for immutable snapshots. NTAP OnTAP and Quantum Myriad have a good story to tell there.

By all means, make those tapes - but you must MUST test what a recovery scenario would look like in a controlled manner, not learn on the job when the company viability is on the line.

Good luck to the under appreciated IT team at Ingram who are trying to unravel this while already hearing "But, How did YOU let this happen?" from the same people who probably complained about every forced OS/system patch pushed down...

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring!

Bananaphooooone

Cisco punts network-security integration as key for agentic AI

Missing the point...

"Cisco developing its own silicon lets it own the full stack, covering everything from the chips to the network infrastructure, to the security infrastructure, to models, to the data platform."

Mkay - and that approach from the #4 (and sinking fast) player in this sort of networking benefits whom?

The turn of phrase "own the full stack" is so classic 2000s Cisco. Reminds me a great deal of the big flap about Cisco UCS. Anyone still running that craptacular, inflexible, and frankly dumb-ass architecture today? Why? In particular, would you ever consider it as a viable alternative for AI workload to the stuff that is coming out of Nvidia, Ampere, Arista or even Dell?

Would you trust the minds that shoved FCoE down your throat to get it right this time?

Cisco "Owning the stack" would only stifle innovation in this space - of course, the AI hypocalypse could use a good stifling, if not a smothering...