Posts by daflibble

OpenAI gets $122B to 'just build things' as the world blows them up

Re: Obscene amounts of money

You'll need to ask an AI about that... For the low low price of $350/month I'm sure it'll tell you.

AI vastly reduced stress of IPv6 migrations in university experiment

But did they stop to ask if they really needed to migrate to IPv6 or could just wait a little longer to something more useful and sensible comes along. Then again it'll all be LLM hallucination writing the next network protocol so who cares. I'll just keep playing with my old IPv4 world a bit longer.

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

so you need a 86% discount?

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: The horror ...

But it's one thing all this AI has gotten really good at.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

So I've always loved the idea of module lego brick style computers as a concept. Slab for compute, slab for storage, slab for specialised I/O, slab for graphics acceleration, click click clunk together a computer you've built.

Unfortunately everyone that tries to figure out this runs into the old problem of the interconnects need to be fast, and that gets difficult and compounded by some bright spark figuring out a faster interconnect that is more sensitive so doesn't work well with something that can be easily plugged and unplugged. There's a recent one I saw being advocated by some tech youtubers again recently, I can't recall who. But it looks like it was going to hit that problem darn quickly again.

However some incentive to force computer manufacturers to have less on one board with more daughter boards that can be replace\repaired would be nice.

I read Dell are putting usb-c connectors on removeable boards in the latest gen of laptops. Oh my won't that be good. The number of perfectly good laptop motherboards that have to be replaced for want of a borken USB-C charging port is silly. Port borked, just pop the case and couple of screws to fit a nice little daughter board sweet.

However, that does remind me of the hell I used to have as a field engineer working on the Toshiba laptops a large UK government department had a large fleet of in the early 2000s. Very repairable, and often failing. Lots of daughter broads and so much that could be component replaced. But oh my so many screws of different types and special order of part tear down. Used to take ages and you'd better hope nobody knocked the table you were working on and some of the screws got lost or the careful layout of what went where was disrupted. Fun times with little screw drivers.

OpenAI wants to blow through $500B on AI infrastructure for itself, with help from pals

You didn't watch the Davos 2023 videos on brain transparency then, you'll find they've been working hard on that.

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

Re: Simple?

someone in marketing found a friend in the exec suite who both wanted to work at Apple instead. That coupled with the lets us AI to stream line things and the AI just spat out use Apple naming and they said lets do that. Apple makes loads of money.

Re: I'll care about anything Dell does...

ah the nose cam days.... I do love to poke fun at the Dell staff at shows about that silliness still.

Year Dells go wrong and have issues as much as pretty much every teir1 vendor I've dealt with in mass deployments over the years. The Dell support experience while having it's total ID10T moments has mostly been pretty seemless aslong as you subscribe to the pro levels and at one point were pretty much on the only people with a sensible approach to accidental damage cover. No fill in a claim that might be accepted before sending unit off for 6+Months for a repair that gets done wrong. Just Yes \ No send engineer next day to repair, if really bad\no parts available offer like for like or better replacement.

They maybe a bit rubbish and break a lot but pretty easy to get Dell to send someone to fix or replace it unlike some other vendors I've dealt with large and small over the years.

HPE wants investors to buy shares to help finance $14B Juniper Networks acquisition

I only see bad things coming out of HPE buying juniper.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: Wow, what Insights...

No that's AI work these days

same as it ever was...

Yep another technology to use as a tool. Problems are not so much the tools or technology, it's knowing what you are trying to do with them, then building the processes.

New Outlook set for GA despite missing some key features

Re: Hilarious

those may arguably be the best features of the new outlook. Although a full suite of migration tooling would be needed to help smooth the path not just a toggle for users to click and break everything.

Microsoft hits snooze again on security certificate renewal

Re: Maybe they should do what I do with my domain renewal

Was this clippies revenge... deleting the calendar reminder?

VMware’s end-user compute community told to brace for ‘Omnissa’ shift

Feels more like an Omnishamble to me

Twitter says it may harvest biometric, employment data from its addicts

Re: Requiring IDs for everyone

AI ID, for AI People vetted by AI, what could possibly go wrong?

Microsoft's 10,000 job cuts didn't quite do the trick

Waste money on marketing with one hand, fire engineers with the other.

They could be saving a fortune by not wasting time and effort rebranding AzureAD as entra.

Prepare for a meme massacre: Snap snuffs out Gfycat in September

Even freely provided content you have the storage capacity to host cheaply gets expensive to provide connectivity to. Traffic over network links costs real money.

Deployed publicly accessible MOVEit Transfer? Oh no. Mass exploitation underway

Oh dear and now the BBC announce they've fallen victim to this.

Inadequate IT partly to blame for NHS doctors losing 13.5 million working hours

Hhahahahah bad UX is subjective.

I remember working on the spine project back in the 2000s. rolling out smartcard readers to Primary care, the poor UX emis system (showing it's dumb terminal design heritage) was only going to be taken from the cold dead hands of it's users. They were so efficient using it's arcane series of shortcut keys. Whereas the newer windows based GUI system (name escapes me) but it took so many clicks to do anything emis users hated it.

Back then the big problem was lack of centralised management of IT across multiple organisations like Acute and Primary care trusts. They were all separate organisations, some with full fledged central IT and SMS management of end clients, other with a dental nurse co-ordinating the IT roll out replacing PC's based on someone tell her the date that shows up when you power on a computer (BIOS Copyright notice) would tell you how old a computer was. You can guess which trust had to send dozens of expensive engineers back revisiting site multiple times to update software and which just pushed updates with 3 guys from a central office.

I doubt things have improved much since then.

Admins run into Group Policy problems after Win10 update

It certainly beats the cluster F&*k of individual hotfixes we used to have. Managing that tangled mess was no fun. Although I would appreciate MS having more of a testing team to find and fix these still too common issues before rolling them out to millions of paying customers would be nice

Electrical explosion at Google datacenter injures three

Re: Arc flash?

I'd be amazed if they didn't have their own sub-stations.

UK's Ministry of Defence awards Boxxe multimillion Microsoft license deal

Re: Middleman

someone must be looking for a new post.

IT departments often regret technology buying decisions

Re: I will never understand

Ah finally the ultimate cost saving measure.... close the business.

Re: Garner is part of the problem

But it's still useful to sell to C-Level when the report says good things about the product you want to buy for other reasons like experience operating and testing it. Not sure how much value it has beyond that though.

Re: Pseudoscience and bad math.

Gotta love a More or Less quote.

First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

Burn all down and start again it's time for star shaped corners and blinking text next year.

Why hasn't windows 12 been announced yet?

When free and open source actually means £6k-£8k per package: Atos's £136m contract with NHS England

Re: Fairly standard pricing

I agree it looks about normal.

Could it be half the price if you retained and kept your own skilled staff to do this inhouse? Yes

However, then you can't ditch them all as quickly in tough time (not that half the idiots writing outsource contracts get that bit right either) and you have all the employee overheads to deal with.

Once you work out a proper packaging, test, and release management cycle it tends to add up quickly. Especially if you don't invest in skills and standardization to automate lots of the process.

Anybody that say's it's easy and cheaper hasn't done it at scale with the kind of weird shit issues that always seem to crop up because the vendor didn't make their application easy to deploy or configure at scale.

Containers make life easier for the software vendors you buy from, and that's why they'll win

Amazon probably know a lot about doing just that. It might be an interesting read one day.

Canonical: Flutter now 'the default choice for future desktop and mobile apps'

Re: Swapped from Microsoft for a reason

Was this on a 386 with 4MB RAM trying to run windows 95 by any chance?

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: The whole point of continuous delivery is to make each release as stable as the one before

I seem to recall a time that was exactly what they said. I still see no point in CentOS stream other than trying to shut down a lot of CentOS users.

Cyber attack against UK power grid middleman Elexon sparks in-house IT recovery efforts

Re: What ?

Without an understanding of cursive writing many historical records are inaccessible. It's more important then typing for without the ability to read historical records there is no hope for the future. Now after they've learned how to write they should be taught how to type, I hate the idea they just learn to do it and it doesn' need teaching. I saw so many teenagers struggling with keyboard skill and I worked in IT for a 6th form college. It was shameful watching teachers and students peck at keyboards slowly.

Spyware maker NSO can't claim immunity, Facebook lawyers insist – it's time to face the music

Re: Pot? Meet Kettle...

Can we not hope they both financially cripple each other to the point of disappearing

1Gbps, 4K streaming, buffering a thing of the past – but do Brits really even want full fibre?

If only they knew then what was to come in 2020

If only they knew what 2020 was going to bring us. Homeworking for all where 10Mbps uploads if your lucky doesn't really cut it.

Inside the 1TB ImageNet data set used to train the world's AI: Naked kids, drunken frat parties, porno stars, and more

Re: Just put everything in the terms and conditions

Well looks like some people are trying this with the new brexit deal ; )

Psst. Hey. Hey you. We have to whisper this in case the cool kidz hear, but... it's OK to pull your data back from the cloud

Re: Yeah? sue us.

It could be just sitting out there in an unsecured S3 bucket and nobody has noticed it yet.

*Spits out coffee* £4m for a database of drone fliers, UK.gov? Defra did game shooters for £300k

I see a future full of drones coming in at less than 250g doing amazing things.

"In a drone! You know, no good reason, but... just because. ;-)"

In a drone you say... excellent. Make that multiple drones operating in an international swam with solar power to provide eco saving credentials + high resiliency and just plain cool press release potential. oh and it could double up as a mesh wifi network platform ; )

It'd be really cloudy ; )

Idiot admits destroying scores of college PCs using USB Killer gizmo, filming himself doing it

Re: Silly "victims"!

Far too much effort, why issue computers when users are so much more productive with an Etch A Sketch and no vulnerable USB ports to plug into. Just think of the IT hardware budget saving too.

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

Oh I had one of these only a couple of years ago.

The Deputy head of the 6th form college I worked for was teaching in a lab classroom when all laptops\desktops were reduced to a crawl after I kicked of a 2TB file transfer from a DR Backup Exec server to a New DR file server. There were a good 100 end point connected to the edge switch stack trying to login with roaming profiles at the time my file transfer was saturating the link. The lab was next to the DR room I was in so I heard the uproar at the issues and quickly terminated the file copy and popped into the room to check everything out. NP all sorted now, I'll investigate and let you know later if I find a root cause.

Turned out a predecessor in my sysadmin role had run out of MTRJ connectors to patch the Backup Exec server into the core switch (as was the habit at this establishment) and had patched it into an edge switch stack with Cat 6 instead. Server had 2x 1Gbps links back to an edge switch which only had 1Gbps uplink to core switch.

On a positive note the core switch upgrade that happened the next summer had no issues getting approval for all the edge stacks uplinks to be upgraded to redundant bonded links. Needless to say I fixed the server patching later and when I finally left that job they had proper Top Of Rack switching for servers with high speed links back to an upgraded core switch infrastructure that no longer used MTRJ fiber connections. They'll not be breaking things that way again without serious mistakes by onsite staff for some time I hope.

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

So nothing much has changed with people reading error messages.

I'm just not sure the computer works here – the energy is all wrong

Reminds me of a similar story at my first employer. They had a client with similar problems with persistent PC crashes. Turned out to be the use of an ARC welding machine on the same mains circuit was the culprit. Temporary loan of a UPS proved the point.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Re: Late to the party. As usual...

I remember them well, still on the bookshelf.

The best way to screw the competition? Do what they can't, in a fraction of the time

Re: "Ethernet is so much better"

>Nobody has yet mentioned Token Ring. The Big Blue alternative.

Another marvellous technology ruined by stupid pricing decisions and underdevelopment.

Last place I worked you could still see all the token ring cabling if you looked in the dark places and above the false ceiling tiles.

Re: "Ethernet is so much better"

>A brief history of timeethernet for you wippersnappers who've never seen anything older than twisted pair with switches.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane

Cathay Pacific hack: Personal data of up to 9.4 million airline passengers laid bare

Re: Another Company That I've Never Heard Of

>Yep. I'm surprised they didn't just say: "It's okay, all those affected had their personal data exposed in the Experian leak

Excellent we could have a new amendment to GDPR which could require organisations when reporting leaks to correlate the information with other known leaks for discounts on fines ; )

UK.gov isn't ready for no-deal Brexit – and 'secrecy' means businesses won't be either

Re: Hmm

I'd vote for moving the UK population to move to Mars. This would be a far reaching visionary future for the country the only sort of thing that's going to save us from the CF called Brexit.

Plex plucks media cloud service, sends users scurrying to exit

Good riddence cloud bollox

Lifetime plex pass holder and couldn't give a (*&^ about the cloud feature.

I wish they'd sort out the DVR stuff though. Still getting issues with Silicondust network tuner and recording to SSD storage.

Hears hoping they have the time to deal with DVR issues now they are not wasting so much time on cloud stuff.

I've seen the future of consumer AI, and it doesn't have one

Re: "I asked ... what exactly ClOi could do"

ClOi definitely another attempt to bypass the few awkward CIO's that do their job like ask difficult questions of digital plans or say no to latest buzzword technology plan. Chief digital officers evidently weren't good enough yes men. We now need yes robots to replace the few hold out CIO's plus you can pay them less ; )

Who wants a quad-core 4.2GHz, 64GB, 5TB SSD RAID 10 … laptop?

Reminds me of the suitcase handle option I used to fit to mini tower PC's to make them luggable back in the 90's.