Posts by JohnSheeran

Trump may hate renewables, but AI datacenters still fancy cheap solar

I generally agree with your sentiment. However, don't let yourself be trapped by things that sounds like good intentions when it comes to government. Even funding of seemingly beneficial things for all of society can easily be politicized or even worse. Why find the cure for something when you can continue to get money for R&D and even treatments that don't cure anything? Even things like energy production and farming can sound beneficial on the surface. It's the proven corruption of the system around all of these things that are really the problem. In the end, government should govern. Everything else is scope creep.

It's the gray areas that kill us.

Re: The article is about the US

I can only guess but logically, most of those gas fields are already owned. Even if the land on top of them isn't the owner, usually the rights to the natural gas are already spoken for.

Oh yeah, politics too.

Yeah, I get it. However, that's my entire point. Subsidies are just a socialization of the cost for all of society. In most cases, they create/hide the illusion of a so-called "good idea". In the end, the cost is the cost to do something. Subsidies are just one more thing a government shouldn't be doing in my opinion. Whether we all pay for it directly as consumers or we pay for it as tax paying citizens, the impact has a baseline and only goes up from there. The fact that the current government administration favors one thing over another thing and the next/previous administration prefers the opposite doesn't make either of them right. Our brain-washed, propaganda-driven preferences don't either.

Nobody in their proper mind would be against renewable/diverse energy sources.*

People are generally against subsidizing things that aren't actually cheaper/better/faster through the government just so those subsidies can advance politics of everyone involved. It doesn't what color your party colors are, they are all corrupt. Since we can't seem to filter out the politics, I guess we're stuck with saying government shouldn't be involved.

That being said, if these data centers can get their power without putting even more drain on an already strained system then that's a good thing. If they can do that cheaper than what that strained system can provide, even better. What has been happening is that they are consuming at high rates, negotiating the cost of the consumption which therefore shifts a disproportionate cost to regular people. Fundamentally not much different than subsidies so them getting out of the system entirely via their own renewable products seems like a good thing.

*As long as those sources don't destroy our world or are based in outright lies about their benefits/risks/harm.

Researchers poison stolen data to make AI systems return wrong results

Re: Dates and elapsed times

*know how

Trump spectrum sale leaves airlines with $4.5B bill for altimeter do-over

Re: Lazy Altimeter Design

Sounds like they should just not use the lower and upper 50mhz of the range they are allowed currently then.

Ransomware attacks kept climbing in 2025 as gangs refused to stay dead

Re: New attitudes and new legislation are needed.

Unfortunately, that's not really how it works though. Personal and sensitive data have become core components of how companies do business. Their transition from paper to digital has just exposed it. The internet exposed it further. Asking any of these companies to change at this point is no different than asking people to not share any of their personal information without a set of conditions being met. It turns out companies = people so stupid is as stupid does.

Legislation is an after-the-fact consideration.

Also, compensating the "victims" isn't the intention of any legislation.

Yeah, the system sucks.

Congress ctrl-Zs bulk of proposed cuts to NASA science

Re: There would be plenty of budget available for NASA ...

While I won't really comment one way or another on the intentions of the "founding fathers" (I wasn't there so I only know what I've read/heard), I don't know that I truly agree with the statement around the 2nd amendment and the militia on the grounds that your characterization means that it's a complete outlier from the rest of the BoR in intent.

Historically (or so I've been told), the ruling governments limited access/rights to things like weaponry to prevent uprisings and to maintain control over the populace. Using that premise, the purpose of the 2nd amendment was a direct reflection of stating that the populace has the foundational rights to defense. This isn't the time/place to expand that argument because I know there are so many people that love to interpret these things according to what they already believe.

Re: There would be plenty of budget available for NASA ...

I can't argue your points. They are valid. I'm just saying that the federal government is generally way more interested in protecting the country via the so-called 'military industrial complex" because that part doesn't whine and complain about it (as much anyway). When it comes to education/healthcare/welfare, no answer seems to satisfy the citizens of the US.

I find a certain irony in the senator election amendment however. If the citizens of a state elected the government in that state, are we saying that the choices of their elected government need to be directly circumvented because that elected government isn't acting in their interests? (Apparently so but it's still a funny idea if you think about it)

Re: There would be plenty of budget available for NASA ...

They favor military spending because our constitution allows them to do that. Feeding, clothing or educating aren't really things that our constitution intended for them to do. You can argue (or downvote me) but our country's structure was intended for those things to be a state-by-state kind of thing. You can even disagree if that's they way it should be done but that was the intent.

Also, Senator's were originally intended to be representatives for the state governments. Up until 1913 and the 17th Amendment, Senators were intended to be elected by state legislators in accordance with Article I, section 3 of the constitution.

So, this is way too many words to say that the US government is operating way outside of the original scope but, sadly, military spending was directly in that scope. (Even though I don't really agree with that particular monster either)

UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow

Re: Another Headline from the "Well, Duh Gazette"

Well, by "here" I meant the readers of this article that are also reading comments.

The UK government may say they believe that but if they actually do anything about it (that's difficult and expensive BTW) remains to be seen. Your nasty feeling is likely reality. It seems to be an unwritten rule that nobody does anything unless they are forced to after it fails.

Another Headline from the "Well, Duh Gazette"

Honestly, who here believes that they should have dependency on things that are completely out of their control to run their country? ALL tech giants are not reliable in this sense. Diversity is the key word here and our entire society seems to moving away from it in almost all aspects.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

I could very well be wrong but the US Government is not known to twist anyone's arm to buy open market items unless they stand to gain something bigger. These large companies are able to twist arms (code for offer ridiculous deals to sweeten the pot) for all governments because it means sales. They are able to do this because all governments are corrupt (all people are corrupt but that's a different conversation) and people in those governments will put personal gain ahead of public gain/benefit. Honestly, this is People 101. Everything is for sale, especially our sense of right/wrong and choice.

I do agree that they should switch to Linux wherever feasible but see People 101.

Man, talk about a conversation that has completely run away. :D

The real truth of why Linux hasn't taken off for the masses is that there is nothing to own for the companies that would be selling it with PCs. No deals to cut, no opportunities for ad revenue, no opportunities for lock in, no opportunities for control. Heck, they could each just spin their own distro even but there is little opportunity there as well.

Pair all of that with a community that can't even agree on most basic ideas and you have what we have.

Even in the corporate world it doesn't work. Large companies don't want to risk having someone else take accountability if they have a problem (or do something wrong). It doesn't matter that these things are really illusions. They are illusions that give them comfort.

I've switched the majority of my stuff off Windows and I'm not looking back but I get it. People aren't going to do things that require them to think. Just read the comments here.

ICE-tracking app developer sues Trump admin after Apple spikes the software

Hilarious comment. You do realize that the majority of citizens in most countries ARE just fine with it as long as it doesn't affect them, right?

You can go ahead and thumbs down me if you want. Unless we are in full on revolt, the law is still the law.

If we are in full on revolt/civil war then I guess all bets are off.

This is such a bizarre conversation to have with people from countries that enforce immigration laws to the letter (or so I've been led to believe). While the tactics used by these knuckleheads leave a lot to be desired, the fundamentals haven't changed.

If the app is for tracking things that have already happened then the author has a valid right to complain about infringement on their FA rights. If they are "warning" people before the government arrival then that sounds like a crime since that kind of thing is generally against the law for pretty much every other example.

Google and Westinghouse lean on AI to speed US nuclear plant builds

Re: Dear God

Up next.......Quantum A.I. !!!!!

AI pilots keep crashing, mostly because firms skip the prep, survey finds

Re: Application?

What's more hilarious is that this is just pure laziness. AI has the ability to self-describe (if you have any belief/experience with it at all) and so you just have to ask an AI to describe not only what it does but what benefit it serves. Unlike the aforementioned IT leaders, it won't lie to you. In fact, all respondents are missing the boat by not using AI to respond.

US taxpayers being kept in the dark over datacenter subsidies

I won't assume your nationality but how well does that tactic work where you live?

I only ask because the amount of money involved so outweighs the average person's ability to counter in our country that you can ask your representatives all you want but it's practically impossible get them to change course because none of us have that kind of money. We recently lost a road race track in my region because someone bought the site for ~$200M USD. The entire community around them couldn't generate even 10% of that amount to counter such an offer. At least the track owners hit the lottery.

Microsoft: Don't let AI agents near your credit card yet

Thank dog for pihole. None of the sponsored links work in those searches on my network.

OpenAI tells Trump to build more power plants or China wins the AI arms race

I'm pretty sure astrophages are the solution to the problem.

Feds flag active exploitation of patched Windows SMB vuln

Not that I support the Corporate Downsizing DOGE efforts but there is always a general lack of transparency when it comes to government actions and impacts. Funding rarely tells the whole story of how departments like these are impacted. Even the funding model in the US government is not easily understood. So, as it was intended, I made a trolling joke.

Weird. I thought DOGE got rid of CISA effectively.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: Old isos

This method may not actually work. It seems that updates stop working after certain releases of updates. After that point you're downloading the ISO and upgrading your installation to continue to get updates and the whole starts over again. At least that's been my experience.

Rufus has been a good tool to get past this problem for now. I'm somewhat apathetic about OS's but MS's shenanigans have made me finally bite the bullet and move to Linux everywhere I can. Not out of anger but just out of fatigue and the realization that I'm not as dependent on Windows as a lot of people are. Life is change.

YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump 'censorship' case go away

I don't know why Jimmy Kimmel didn't take this route and just sue the companies that restricted his free speech.

AI is an over-confident pal that doesn't learn from mistakes

So, is the article saying that all GenAI suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Tata Consultancy enforces return-to-office mandate for all US staff, effective immediately

Re: I'm sure the C-suite will be in the office

But that's the problem. The C-suite IS in the office everyday because they are all megalomaniacs and sociopaths. They can't "control" things the way they want if they work remote so they want their people in the office with them.

I do find it ironic that the majority of the commenters on El Reg complain about not wanting be treated like worker drones but they want the jobs of worker drones. It's just a weird contrast.

Europe's cloud datacenter ambition 'completely crazy' says SAP CEO

It really seems like his usual ADHD approach to everything. He goes off the deep end and rails against whatever/whomever made him unhappy and then apparently realizes/remembers he's the richest man in the world and goes back to all of his other craziness.

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

Even if they could/would ask everyone before they used their content, how would you effectively govern such a mechanism? Are we back to the court system? Globally? That sounds like that would work great.

I'm not advocating either way so don't take my post as meaning anything beyond the question.

Google DeepMind promises to help you evolve your algos

I didn't read the article and the answer is 42*.

(*....or did remember the wrong computer?)

GAO finds billions in possible government savings, all without Elon's help

Fun stuff. This is following the typical pattern in corporate America. A big "cut expenses" project is started. Everyone panics and whines about the injustice of an outside group telling them they are wasting money. The outside group won't actually find any savings that others couldn't already find. They just create fear that people are going to lose their jobs. Sometimes people do lose their jobs. The outside group finds some of the "well duh" cost savings opportunities. Woohoo! Mission accomplished! Now the groups inside the company are scared and finally understand the assignment. They start cleaning up their areas and find big savings on the dumb things they were doing. Everyone is unhappy but expenses are cut. Fast forward five years. All of the waste and stupidity start again and five years after that you're doing this same routine over again. Why? Because everyone that started every part of this dysfunctional cycle have moved on/retired/died/whatever and now the new people have started the same dysfunctional cycle.

AWS creates EC2 instance types tailored for demanding on-prem workloads

Re: 400G

You're talking apples and oranges. While Ethernet may have that kind of bandwidth, it doesn't mean that a single point on the network can use that bandwidth efficiently. Ethernet is also not very efficient and there are a bunch of factors in handling Ethernet devices. It doesn't mean that Ethernet is inferior but you're comparing a network interface to a block device interface. Block device interfaces running a SCSI command set (think SAS, Fiber Channel and even InfiniBand) usually have much higher functional performance than ethernet but also have other limitations that are similar like latency. Also, NVME devices don't require bus interfaces like SAS in order to be used. NVME devices can be connected as direct PCI-E devices and perform at that bus speed. They do often get connected to array controllers so they can be grouped together for other efficiencies such as RAID sets, etc. but that's not always the case.

Mainframes aren't what you think they are. Fundamentally, they use most of the same technologies in use by x86 platforms today. In fact, stop using the word "Mainframes" like it means some abstract idea that is super powerful. The current "mainframe" is the IBM Z16. The Z16 runs processors based on the Telum platform which operate at around 5Ghz. That clock speed is meaningless however because, as it relates to workloads, it's just a pile of clock cycles that the scheduler uses. In the end, it doesn't matter because your "mainframes" use the S390 instruction set that is a parallel processing platform. It's Big Endian. Porting your workloads to a proprietary IBM platform makes no sense in the modern world.

Even if it might, widely scalable networks using that amazing Ethernet bandwidth you just touted makes it obsolete and unnecessary because scale out architectures tend to offer better performance than strict scale up architectures unless you have a very special use case that needs massive performance vertically. Oh, wait, the mainframe sucks at that too.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

How does this fit into "Who me?"

Fun/interesting story but it doesn't seem to fit with the other articles you've published in this column.

SoftBank buys server-grade Arm silicon designer Ampere Computing

Re: What

You are probably right on both counts. Especially the ROI. American companies love to capitalize on short term gain. It's why our country is such a mess.

It looks like IBM is cutting jobs again, with Classic Cloud hit hard

If you work for IBM then I'm genuinely sorry for you. Especially if you're "close" to retirement but not close enough.

Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options, says Dutch parliament

Re: @MiguelC

You should probably just give up. You're being downvoted at this point because those with torches and pitchforks have decided you are the same as the "bad orange man". Nothing you say at this point is going to change that in their eyes.

The orange man is bad. The old, incompetent man was bad too. The orange man before that was bad. And so on and so forth. It's a wasted conversation.

Worry not. China's on the line saying AGI still a long way off

Re: Generative AI models have passed the Turing Test ...

You can upload images to ChatGPT. You can request it to perform an action.

It seems like a great experiment to see what the result is. I'm surprised no one has attempted it already.

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

It's not just the FAA

This problem exists everywhere in America. Base on a lot of the commentary here, I would say it just exists everywhere. Tech companies are infatuated with "new" and "better" and don't care about "what you already have". You compound that by looking at the shift in the tech industry toward automation and "it just works" architectures and you end up with a lot of stuff that "just works" until it doesn't. Add in a healthy dose of up-and-coming youth that has no interest in infrastructure, how things work (are supposed to work) and all of the other fun descriptions us "old people" aim at the next generations and you end up with no one to support this stuff and keep it alive. In corporate America at least, this problem is the next guy's problem and not mine in our senior leadership ranks. Remember, fixing what ain't broke so it won't break in the future doesn't make money NOW so it's just a loss that was in the original business case.

Yeah, it all sucks.

Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus promises Cloud PC comebacks in 30 minutes

Sadly, that's been a thing for over 8 years. Amazon Outposts and Azure Stack have been offerings to bring "cloud" into your data center for awhile now.

Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

I've posted this sentiment before but the WGF is par for the course for corporate America. Anyone that has ever worked for an American large corporation has gone through this at one time or many in their careers. Every time costs need to be cut or something needs to change, it comes down to the "prove your reason for existence". It's not new. It's just that it's a shock that we elected Corporate America to the Whitehouse (not really surprising but that's a harder, stickier conversation).

Agreed that they did their jobs too well. They continue to do so. The problem we're really seeing is that we decided about 10 years ago that we only needed developers and the rest of infrastructure could be done by them as a side job. It turns out that they don't want to do and cannot do that part of the job. Now, as the population grows, infrastructure professionals haven't grown at the same rate. You couple that with all of the "it just works" technologies (thanks Apple, et al) then you end up with a lot of up and coming people having no interest in learning any of this stuff because, well, "it just works". Since we only seem to learn when it doesn't just work then that's one bite out of this particular pickle.

There are no easy answers to this problem and those items are just a few of the sources of the problem. (We won't bother talking about the dumbing down of the population of America or anywhere else because that would really ruffle feathers)

NASA's on-again, off-again job cuts – what's the plan?

It's really funny how everyone reads so much into this. This is typical behavior from Corporate America. Ready, fire, aim. I've seen it so many times before when it's "cost cutting time" that it's laughable at this point.

Insiders say IBM's broader return-to-office plan hits older, more expensive staff hard

Re: "skills rebalancing will be perpetual"

It just depends on where you work. There are many companies that are well known for this tactic. The answer for that is simple; don't work at those companies.

For the rest, it really just isn't a thing so much. If you work for a large technology company then you should already be aware that it's their way of business to roll through these cycles. If you work for a large bank (let's just say Chase) then they are already well known for that kind of hiring/firing routine.

Shockingly to those that don't live here, there are plenty of companies that still offer decent employment. In fact, since I work at one of those companies, they have plenty of people that do so little that it makes you wonder why the hiring/firing thing isn't more widespread.

Reclassification is making US tech job losses look worse than they are

Re: There is worse to come

I'm not sure what an upvote to your post is supposed to indicate.

DeepSeek's not the only Chinese LLM maker OpenAI and pals have to worry about. Right, Alibaba?

Re: An Inevitability

Why does the USA need to product more smart people when they can get smart people cheaper from those other countries? Seems like a bad investment. We don't need more smart people. We just need that can buy what we make somewhere else. What do you mean that if people don't have jobs they won't be able to afford that stuff? Bah. They don't seem to be struggling right now. Let's keep this up.

Yeah, my country is stupid.

Fear of the unknown keeps Broadcom's VMware herd captive. Don't be cowed

Re: I'm migrating away

I'm with you. I've been running Proxmox at home for the last year or so and I've become extremely happy with it. I had been a VMware admin/engineer at a Fortune 100 company for the last 20+ years and was very accustom to all of the great things it does/did but I don't see the need to go back, EVER. At my company? Well, just one big sad face. :(

Re: "eed to consider it a networking vendor first, a storage supplier second"

Certification is nothing more than a promise that someone will "guarantee" that it's supposed to work. IMO, certification nowadays is completely meaningless. It's just a word. It used to be (or seemed to be at least) that certification came with a list of tests and validations that someone did to ensure that something did what it was advertised to do. Now? Just a word.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

I know this will fall on deaf ears and get a lot of downvotes but the issue of switching from Windows to Linux on the desktop isn't that it can't be done (easily). It's that there are so many pieces of software out there that just aren't made for Linux and no real effort has been made to address that problem. Just for a minute, imagine that you're using a PC for something besides pointless web browsing and personal productivity software. Imagine you are using it to run software for other hobbies (in my case, motorsports) and that those hobbies use software that is Windows only. On top of that, those software packages actually interact with hardware (e.g. USB ports, COM ports, etc.) and support for that level of stuff just isn't there in Linux(Wine). Yeah, it sucks. But until we get all of those little pocket industries to start adopting Linux like they have Windows/Mac, it will continue to be a barrier to greater adoption.

With Gelsinger gone, to fab or not to fab is the $7B question

Re: Well that explains it

It's the typical American problem though. It's a short term winning strategy. The failure of the strategy is that it is self-consuming. It is based on the idea that American consumers will continue to be a huge source of revenue because it's where the bulk of the money is. In the long term it will fail because the continued erosion of American wealth will come to a head when only the upper echelon can afford the products that these companies produce. Nvidia's future may not rely on this sort of thing but Apple's certainly does.

I'm sure this opinion will get downvoted because it's not a snarky one-liner.

A year after Broadcom took control of VMware, it's in the box seat

Re: What Rivals?

I wouldn't trust HPE at this point after the dump of all their software to Micro Focus when they split to HP/HPE. My company got burned by both that and Server Automation as well.