Posts by M.V. Lipvig

Sweden’s Evroc going full Viking with Euro cloud to raid US providers

Re: "Europe's digital economy must be built on a European foundation"

The part you're missing comparing home grown to AWS is, home grown is there, AWS is US, and as soon as there is a viable EU provider the EU will likely start vigorously auditing companies that do business with US providers and fining them on per-bit basis when data is mishandled. It won't take long before using a European provider is the only way to go for European companies. I also doubt multiple providers will price themselves into bankruptcy. What will happen is many will start, then eventually they'll merge until there are 2 or 3 providers.

Re: "Europe's digital economy must be built on a European foundation"

"If we only knew just how much Microsoft is shipping overseas."

I can answer that - all of it.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Don't know why

you guys are bagging on Americans because El Reg chose to use the American spelling for checks. We know what cheques are, and we aren't the ones wanting them to Americanize the site. Perhaps you should start emailing them every time they Americanize a story? Doesn't make me any difference, but this story would have maybe 5 comments if the "correct spelling" comments were removed.

Really, the more concerning thing here is using just a phone number to identify a bank account. Unless there's more to it than that, seems a thief could start cleaning out bank accounts wholesale.

Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State

Not really, I've heard Mercedes referred to as Mercs for years. And, BMWs are properly referred to as BMs. Because the are BMs.

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

Re: Why I prefer to work from home

10. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

11. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

12. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

13. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

14. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

15. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

16. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

17. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

18. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

19. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

20. Not smelling someone's microwaved leftover fried shrimp.

Forget that. My company tried something similar, and the end result was one day of lost productivity each day we had to work in office because on the in-office day nobody really worked. They jawjacked all day long catching up on the gossip. The company was paying us to attend an hour-long meeting that could be summed up in a single emailed paragraph, and were supplying food for us to boot - coldish pizza from a particularly nasty pizza joint. So, keep doing that or just save everyone a huge hassle all the way around? They finally gave it up as a bad job all round, we're now permanent WFH, productivity is great and the company cancelled a shitload of leases so they're saving a ton of dough as well. And, it's saving everyone time and money. With pets and a wife at home my utilities are running anyway, my internet is fixed bandwidth all you can eat (as it should be) and the few extra cents I spend a month running my work rig is dwarfed by what I'm not spending driving 2 hours a day and paying for downtown parking.

Re: if it ain't broke, don't "fix" it

"Do companies really think that forcing commutes and office-babble-noise in order for employees to do the same thing at the office that one can do at home is going to raise morale?x

No, but directors heavily invested in commercial properties know it will raise morale - THEIR personal morale.

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Re: AI Infused

Coloured pencil department? Advise them that AI stands for the Anal Invader toy set, and they've signed themselves up for a year's subscription which will send new attachments for the set once a month, and would they prefer the kit be delivered to the office or to their homes on random days and times during the workweek?

Re: So ? Is AI the new "cloud computing"?

Yes, but no. The ones YOU build may have an on/off switch, but the ones covertly built by AI will not.

Amazon Ring, Alexa accused of every nightmare IoT security fail you can imagine

Re: A question that didn't get asked?

Considering medicine has been around thousands of years and they've only in the last 20 years started taking medical privacy seriously, I don't expect tech privacy in our lifetimes. This is why I severely limit tech in my house, and do my best to make sure any data that is collected is useless to the collector.

Re: Lessons clearly not learned here

As far as elections go, the way you make them fair and open is in person voting, the requirement to show ID, and a standardized paper ballot that must be retained for 1 year for auditing purposes. But beyond that, you must take the money out of politics, like requiring all personal assets to be put into a blind trust, and all politicians having an annual audit of all money to the last penny requiring an explanation of anything they have that's more than their government salary. Further, require them to live under their own laws (in the US, Congress is generally exempt from any laws they pass) and do not allow anyone to hold the same office twice (no reelections) or hold another political office for 10 years after their term is up.

Taking the money out of politics and ensuring the vote woulr go a long way towards correcting a lot of America's political problems.

Re: Lessons clearly not learned here

"It's a great example of how tying everything together into one network (CAN in this case) can make things unrepairable."

Yes, the happy goal of car makers everywhere - 100 grand for an exonobox, must be replaced with a new one when a 3 cent part fails.

Seriously, boss? You want that stupid password? OK, you get that stupid password

Re: perhaps the MD knows enough about Unix to know that the password couldn't be all numbers

Not the same thing. In the San Francisco case, the engineer deliberately set out to make sure only he had access. In the case of the story, the director asked him to change the password for him as he was leaving, and he changed it to what he heard was said. The company would have a much harder time proving any maliciousness here

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Re: I knew of a company

That would have been microwave link.

Re: Weather?

You can do quite a bit of aiming. In the 1990s a company called Astarte had an optical cross connect machine that would allow you to make optical connections by aiming the fibers at a pair of mirrors. It was really quite clever. The box had fibers coming into both sides, and were aimed at a pair of mirrors. The fibers were servo controlled and the mirrors had servos that woul allow the mirror to be distorted. Light would come into the box on a fiber, bounce off the mirrors and out another fiber, and the servos all worked together to aim the light inside the box. I actually found a story about it from back then.

astarte_launches_all_optical_star_switch_cross_connect_switch

Re: Over the years ...

The last company I worked for maintained such a system between Chicago and New York City. It's some customized bodge with no error checking and no telemetry between the spans, each regen node just boosts the signal to the next one. It's been a while since I worked there but I think latency was around 10ms on that span while any other span had latency of about 30ms between Chicago and New York. That span was also laid out almost as though they ran a string from Chicago to New York City, pulled it tight and dropped a regen along it every 30 miles. It was a real pain to work, and there's only one old geezer at an unrelated company that performs any sort of vendor support. He probably gets about 50 grand per phone call off it. Nice work if you can get it. I'm glad I no longer deal with it

This was something I was concerned about with my own microwave internet, which crosses a lake to reach the other side, but my main concern was temperature inversions. The dew point that creates fog also acts as a mirror to microwave and will deflect signal for a short time, until the temp wave moves beyond the range of the antenna. The solution is dual antennas with one mounted about 7 field manuals over the other, so as the temp inversion moves it only reflects one antenna at a time. Had a helluva time convincing a customer who had a T1 over microwave to an island on why his circuit was dropping twice a about 10 minutes at a time in the spring and fall, but he finally accepted it, or had a dual antenna set installed.

Watchdog calls for automatic braking to be standard in cars

Re: Yet another waste of time and money

You forgot,, make it a primary offense, not secondary. Let the plod pull you over if they see you fiddling with your phone.

Yes, because bugs only ever hit cars when they're parked, and never on the highway.

It is. Pick your poison.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=consumer+reports+tesla&t=brave&ia=web

Re: Unintended consequences

What's really bad is when the systems speak to each other. I was driving a moving truck that had GPS connected to the autobrake, and in a construction zone with narrowed lanes the GPS noticed me drifting into an exit lane on a 65MPH road with a 25mph exit speed. I was in rush hour traffic at the time, and the GPS decided I was taking the exit when I wasn't and the truck slammed on the brakes hard. I was almost rear ended by a line of impatient traffic as a result. As far as I'm concerned those systems should be banned as a road hazard.

Amazon finds something else AI can supposedly do well: Spotting damaged goods

I look forward to

when restaurants are fully automated, for then I shall break into one and live out my life eating porcuswine burgers and drinking whatever passes for liquid refreshment for the rest of my life. I shall get away with it my adding my meal to the bill on larger orders, so the money tallies correctly for the corporation. I will only need to hide once a month, when the delivery truck delivers the raw materials for the printers that make the food.

AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo

If you knew anything about the NRA other than what the media pushes, you'd know that gun safety is a very important part of the organization. Do you know who you don't see committing mass shootings? NRA members.

California rolls closer to requiring drivers in driverless trucks

Re: Bonehead AI

No, but you will have driverless trucks sitting at the self-serve pumps, waiting to be refueled by someone who will never show.

It's rare

when I will agree with a Democrat, and even more rare when I will agree with a union puke, but in this they are 100 percent correct. Fully automomous vehicles will never work in our lifetimes. The best we can ever hope to see is network controlled vehicles on specified roadways with drivers in control in local settings. Think Demolition Man here. We'll drive ourselves to main artery roadways, tell the car to interface and tell the system our destination, then the network will route us to the most efficient path to where we're going. The network will then hand the car back to you for local driving or, barring a response from you, will either pull your car to the side of the road and stop or will drive you to the nearest hospital. But under no circumstances do I want to be on the highway with large driverless trucks. Electronics DO occasionally fail and I don't want to be driving in front of one when it does.

Besides, it'll take about 5 minutes for the local criminal organizations to figure out how to hijack driverless trucks. Load after load will disappear.

Microsoft stashes nearly half a billion in case LinkedIn data drama hits

Re: Great way to cut taxes

"Great for your current account in the short term but long term its likely to be detrimental"

That depends on whether or not Ireland gets greedy about it. As long as it's cheaper overall and th Irish government remembers to kick a little back to the correct people, it won't matter.

Laid-off 60-year-old Kyndryl exec says he was told IT giant wanted 'new blood'

It is its own company, spun off from IBM. It is traded on the stock exchange as KD. My guess would be that IBM scraped all its crap into one division and spun it off, and when/if it fails they will shake their heads and say what a shame.

Incidentally, it's not uncommon for spinoffs to keep using parts of the old company. A recent spinoff from my own company is now leasing access to our trouble ticketing system, and presumably are evaluating new ticketing systems.

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

Still think it's a good idea?

I'm sure that somewhere deep in the legalsleeze is a line saying something to the effect of "If we screw up and lose all your data, our financial responsibility begins and ends with 'Oops, sorry about that.' " So off your data goes to thr cloud, perhaps never to be seen again, and there goes your business WHEN, not if, it disappears.

Microsoft Windows latest: Cortana app out, adverts in

One, did you tell the computer you bought a washer, or do like everyone else and go to a store to buy after the research? The ad slingers think you're still looking.

And two, you aren't the customer here - you're the victim. Quite frankly, the ad slingers could care less if you buy anything. All they want is to show the ad, and have verification that we looked at the ad.

If we want a truly effective ad filter that the Googler won't try to bypass, all that ad filter needs to do is report back that every ad was looked at, or even better click through on the ad. If a filter can click through without using bandwidth or cycles, the Googler would see an uptick in revenue and would never try to defeat it.

Virgin Orbit-uary: Beardy Branson's satellite launch biz shutters

Re: Ego laughing while rolling in cash

Yes, I was one who was invested and lost. But that's the nature of investing in new companies, sometimes you win and sometimes you don't. Had the launch gone well, I'd have made a nice little pile and Britain would have a viable domestic space launch capability. We all lost out here.

Minnesota governor OKs broad right-to-repair tech law

Re: Waiting for John Deer to become Dear John

It's already cost them some money. Not much, as I am only one person, but I refuse to buy John Deere stuff for my farm. My tractor is a Massey Fergusen, and I can fix anything I want on it myself.

Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business

Glad to see this

I had a few bucks invested in both Galactic and Orbit. Sadly Orbit crashed and burned with that stupid fuel filter, taking my money with it, but if they start successful flights in June I should come out ahead with both. Sucked on Orbit because had that flight gone OK I'd have made quite a bit from it. The only silver lining was nobody died when the rocket blew up.

I have no interest in going myself though. I'll wait till I can be beamed aboard before I willingly go to space.

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Re: DO NOT go on the Internet with XP

But would it be taken over? Are any bad actors still spending any time trying to get into an XP box? I would think that a hacker seeing an XP box would be the equivalent of a car thief opening someone's garage door, ready to steal a car, and seeing a Morris Marina.

Fahrenheit to take over Celsius

Re: Fucking with Google ?

Really? We in the US can switch between metric and imperial seamlessly. Pounds and kilograms, quarts and liters, since we use both we know both.

Experimental brain-spine computer interface helped a paralyzed man walk

Re: What's next?

"and the other receives data from the electrodes over UHF. "

I was kinda thinking the other direction - could an Atari joystick and a UHF transmitter let me turn this guy into a live action Pitfall Harry?

Re: Regenerative medicine

Wrong-o. Money is not single use, it churns and burns and eventually returns. The bleeding edge research you want is funded by those mundane hip implants you don't want. Every time you buy an aspirin, a medication that's been around a thousand years, part of the money goes to the drug company's research team working on Dr McCoy's "grow a new kidney" pill. Research here can lead to improvements there. About the only place that stopping investing helps science would be telescope development, because we really would be better off developing space travel over optical imaging as we can only guess when looking vs going there and knowing. So far as medicine though, we need all avenues open. Quite often, research on one disease actually yields an effective treatment for other diseases. Trying to tunnel vision research will drastically reduce its effectiveness.

Neuralink says US OKs human experiments with Elon's brain chips

Re: Cyborgs or humans using tools?

I agree. I often don't even know where my phone is for hours at a time, and it doesn't bother me. I'd have to be pretty desperate to have a chip stuck in my head that might blow up or catch fire without warning, which Musk's junk seems to do quite often.

LIGO cranks up the sensitivity to sniff out gravitational waves

Re: Well my dear...

It's stuck! Hit the jettison button!

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Clothing corallary

I wish I had done this. I bought a Lands End lightweight jacket. It was comfortable from 50 degrees down to 10 degrees, which was surprising as it was no heavier than a windbreaker. And, it fit really well with sleeves long enough to fit my oranguanesque arms. The replacement doesn't fit nearly as well, is far more bulky and does not keep me as comfortable as the temps fall off. I still have the old one as a shop jacket and even with the burn mark and faded coloring it works better than my new one.

Re: The one law of TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC

Could be worse. I looked at it in 2010 with a thousand dollars in my hand and said nah, looks like a scam to me. I was right, of course, but anyone in at 2010 was at the top of the pyramid, and I'd have enough to win a US Presidential election today if I'd bought it then.

Re: PSUs

I have one powering the automobile CD player in my shed. 120v in, music out. Been working great for years.

You'll [BZZ] like Intel’s [BZZ] NUC 13 Pro once the fan [BZZ] stops blowing

I have a tower computer

Smoking specs when I built it. Sadly it died late last year, so I replaced it with a midrange micro form box that measures 6in by 6in by 1.5in. This one has no fans at all, and is a lot faster than my custom tower ever was. The only bad is it's a Win10 box, but I wanted one to play with.

Eventually I plan to use one as a SAN to put music and movies on my home network so as to not need CDs or DVDs anymore. The one I have can address up to a 2TB SSD drive which should hold most if not all of my collection. I'm also building a car and will be using one as a juke box along with letting me program the car's ECU. I like these tiny little boxes.

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: What you're missing is that they're _right_.

Let me tell you what I, as a user of IT setvices, want from IT.

I want my computer to log me into the system every time.

I want my applications to spin up and work, every time.

When you make changes to how I do my job, I want that change to make my job easier, not harder.

I do NOT want to have to log into a VPN, to access a VPN, to access a VPN, to access a VPN, to reach an application. Yes, I actually have to do this sometimes, because IT doesn't want to built a shortcut to let me reach the last VPN on the first go around. I don't mind that I have to log into a VPN at the start of my shift, but once in I should be able to hit every application by logging into it.

Speaking of VPNs, I do not want them to time out after 5 minutes of inactivity. Sometimes it takes time for a field tech to do his bit, and I should not have to spend 20 minutes logging back in to check. I may not be actively working in that VPN because sometimes I have other issues to work on while waiting on the field tech. All in all, I spend a good 30 percent of my shift logging and relogging into stuff and that means I'm not fixing as many circuits as I should be doing.

I am also sick of the constant password requirement updates. Yes, I get security, but I have to maintain access to 50-60 different systems, all with differing password requirements and all with more and more complicated password requirements. What makes it worse, the requirements for a valid password are never listed so making a change takes forever. And worse than that? Reducing the time between changes. All that, and you guys leave admin access to the network set to username admin password nimda, for your own convenience? Yeah, I know your dirty little secrets!

All in all, I want to do my job quickly and effectively. I do not even want to know IT exists. If I am constantly having to open tickets with you because something broke, as far as I'm concerned the IT are useless numpties who are out of their depth. On the other hand, if I never have to think about IT because I never interact with them, give that department a raise, they're obviously highly competent experts in their field.

Re: Oh the pain!

What's really bad is when that misic is the same instrument-only refrain repeated 3 times during that 15 seconds. It becomes mind numbing after 10-15 minutes, although after 30 years I've built up an immunity.

The best hold music ever - there's one company that plays entire songs, 1950s to 1990s, rotating the decades through one at a time, and it's not the same 5 songs over and over. I could stay on hold with THAT company my entire shift.

Re: Oh the pain!

What I like are the ones where they link resolving a consumer (who has one computer) network access problem to a web page, which I would not need if the computer could access the internet. And since the network is not working, directing you to a web site to run a network troubleshooter kinda doesn't work.

Encoded 'alien message' will reach Earth today, but relax: It's just a drill

Are Earthlings white or dark meat?

ND738A, racial epitaths are contrary to FCC regulations!

And is red or white wine appropriate for the meal?

- Aliens contacting Oliver Wendell Jones, Bloom County, to the best of my recollections as 1988 was a long time ago.

Google wants to target you – yes, YOU – with AI-generated ads

Oh I can't wait!

After seeing what AI has done so far, the ads are gonna be a hoot! I'll certainly enjoy watching the fallout when the ads turn as racist as a southern Democrat pining for the days when he could legally own people. And it'll probably happen about 5 minutes after the Googler decides it can run unattended. It'll probably be years before they figure out how to remove the racist rhetoric permanently, assuming it's even possible.

I think it'll take longer than people think before AI can start taking jobs.

Russian IT guy sent to labor camp for DDoSing Kremlin websites

Re: Possibilities - Response

"The smarter way would be to not use your own PC for any part of it. It's like not using your own car, as the getaway vehicle, and not using your personally-owned gun, to commit a bank robbery."

Unless he admitted to it, it would be possible that someone else used his computer for this.

Re: Possibilities

What makes you think the West doesn't already know all there is to know on Russia's hypersonic missiles, considering 30 year old missile defense systems are easily able to pluck them out of the air? Western spy agencies are incredibly effective these days.