Posts by JohnSheeran

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.

What Rivals?

Let's talk about the real problem here; there are practically no rivals. Keep in mind that this is at the enterprise level. If you are small to medium then you should really consider Proxmox. If you are Enterprise then the only apparent life-for-like option is Nutanix and they seem to be too stupid to realize that adopting the use of external storage would open the whole world to them. Of course there are those that think that moving to the cloud is the right answer but those people don't work at companies where the disruption to the business to do this means that it will take years.

The actual lift and shift options are basically one option at the enterprise level. Boo.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Size XXL. I guess they know their audience.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

Re: Why would you ever use your real name for forum posts?

Maybe but I wouldn't count on it. ;)

Why would you ever use your real name for forum posts? Real question BTW.

AI poetry 'out-humans' humans as readers prefer bots to bards

40 years of the good ole U S of A's liberal education system is finally bearing fruit. Unfortunately it's rotten, stinking fruit. That's why we're stuck with the Tangerine Nightmare.

Amazon to cough $75B on capex in 2024, more next year

He we go with price hikes. Yay!

Ex-Intel board members make an ill-conceived case for spinning off Foundry

Re: Or…..they are correct

What you're really pointing out is that the West is not competitive against countries where the standard of living is much lower. That's not a particularly insightful revelation. The West (in particular, my home country) is in a state of slow decline for the long term because we've become dependent on doing things purely for profit. I know that's a "well duh" kind of statement in so many ways but there are many things we should be doing that should be OK if they just break even. Core capabilities should be supported without the concern for profit. Our economic system shouldn't be run as if profit is the only that matters.

That's a lot of rambling but it would appear that the lessons learned about the global supply chain during the pandemic are starting to fade.

Win 11 refreshes delayed, say PC makers – and here's why

Re: AI Computers

I'm pretty sure their idiocy is the real thing and not artificial.

Feds urge 3D printing industry to end DIY machine guns

Re: Okay, sure

The real problem is that there are no "regular people". We are all kooks but just out of phase with each other.

White House seizes 32 domains, issues criminal charges in massive election-meddling crackdown

Re: "The Biden administration"?

What fantasy are you referring to exactly? Obviously, you're not an American so you don't appear to have the faintest idea of what's actually happening in this country. I can make that statement because there is not a single American that would make a reference to "Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democrat party".

After that, everything you typed was nothing short of a rant because you want to impose your own beliefs of what you *think* is happening in my country. The rant you're spouting is all media-fueled propaganda. What I see everyday with real people doesn't match what I see through the media thankfully.

Maybe you should just move here and fix it for us since you seem to have all the answers.

Last thought; both parties and all of the extremists on both side of the equation are what's really wrong with our country. I'm sure you think I'm on the opposite side of you just because I don't agree with the extreme way you responded and that just means you're part of the problem.

Re: "The Biden administration"?

Trump is a major irritant (and bozo). However, don't overlook that the other side of the coin is just as responsible for this destabilization in American politics and society. Challenging almost every historical belief, religion and social norm is destabilizing. Whether you believe those things are right or wrong is beside the point. They are still destabilizing and can be manipulated by outsiders. The Trump "movement" is just another irritant that adds fuel to the fire of that social/political change. Does anyone really believe that actual Christians support Trump positively or do you realize that support is based on the idea that it's a resistance to the social change that may be occurring? It's pretty easy to sow discord in this scenario.

Software innovation just isn't what it used to be, and Moxie Marlinspike blames Agile

Re: Misleading headline?

Agile done extremely poorly without the benefit of all the components is what we are seeing I believe. In the corporate world, agile dev is a joke.

Silicon, stars, and sulfur make Apollo's unlikely legacy

Re: Evidence

How dare you suggest using the brains intellectual capacity to LEARN?!!

Administrators have update lessons to learn from the CrowdStrike outage

Things like Crowdstrike are just a piece of your security posture. Delayed updates shouldn't cause a major concern. Maybe some consideration should be given to using a single vendor to provide this capability across your entire company.

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

I'm betting it's going to suck when Sam stops giving those families that $1000 a month.

Forget feet and inches, latest UK units of measurement are thinking bigger

Re: What the hell is a meter?

If that bugs you then wait to hear what they've done to "decimation".

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

"To demonstrate the security implications of this, Pocwierz said that he opened up his S3 bucket for public writes, and in less than 30 seconds it amassed over 10 GB of data from numerous sources."

So, you open your bucket to the public and you expected what exactly? You use unnamed open source tools and they rack up writes? While I might agree with the injustice of AWS charges, the incompetence of their users is also a significant point of concern.

If Britain is so bothered by China, why do these .gov.uk sites use Chinese ad brokers?

"If Britain is so bothered by China, why do these .gov.uk sites use Chinese ad brokers?"

Because they have no idea how any of this stuff actually works and therefore had no idea they were even using said ad brokers.

Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director

You didn't get downvoted on that first comment. Obviously you're going to get downvoted on this most recent comment. It appears that a lot of people that comment here at El Reg (or the internet for that matter) are complete a-holes. Most downvote with no comment to defend their downvote. It's just the internet.

That being said, I would blame you for withdrawing from commenting going forward. I generally feel the same way.

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Re: Really?

Agreed but since when have these companies cared about my/your bottom line?

Re: Really?

It's not just M$'s bottom line we're talking about here. This is just general economics and evolution at play. If the demands of hardware don't increase then there is no reason to build bigger/better. If people don't have a need to upgrade then we're talking about stretching out the lifecycle of this stuff and that harms everyone's bottom line.

It all sucks.

AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

Re: Reasoning

"Every decision that we make, as intelligent or stupid beings, will exhibit a bias based on the data we've trained on. The only question is whether we, morally, accept any given bias."

Replying to you since you continued the thought that caught my eye. The conditional is one of the biggest reasons that LLMs will struggle in the near term. While I'm no expert on human intelligence, I do think that the conditionals are what often catches us up when we try to articulate ideas. Using the sentence above, it uses decision as the main object with immediate conditional of intelligence (that's a big one) then a conditional of data training. After that, it adds a conditional of bias acceptance and then an overarching measure of morality which has an entirely different set of rules that may be based on either the same questionable foundation or an entirely different foundation and both or either may be based on a compounding and looping set of conditionals.

Seems like this intelligence thing is very difficult to figure out. I'm sure something artificial can figure it out pretty easily.

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

Re: Advice in dealing with Oracle audits

One does not simply get off Oracle.

Re: Advice in dealing with Oracle audits

That's great advice if you don't already have Oracle. If you do, not helpful.

The self-created risk in Broadcom's big VMware kiss-off

What's the thumbs down for this? If you're going to give it, at least defend it.

It's not really a single thing that Broadcom has planned/is doing that's the problem. It's the laundry list of bad things they are doing/planning that is pissing off corporate customers. That coupled with the fact that these same corporate customers have already been through a similar problem with Broadcom on the mainframe side is what will really be their demise. I work at a Fortune 100 company and we're in the process of moving to something else. It's not a question of "if", it's a question of "when".

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Isn't this really the whole foundation of the move to something like memristor?

After injecting cancer hospital with ransomware, crims threaten to swat patients

Sounds like terrorism.

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

Re: Not an angry place .

It's always great to see a thumbs down without a retort.

Perfect example of what this has become.

Re: Not an angry place .

I generally agree with most of what you're saying except to say that anonymity or lack of it is now somewhat meaningless. If you had a guy called "Luke Skywalker" back in the day then you didn't believe that was a real person and therefore you believed it was a nickname that made that user anonymous. Now, you see a name like "John Sheeran" and you may or may not believe that's a real name belonging to a real person. It would seem that everyone has basically realized that anonymous/real is meaningless now and that people can just behave however they want to behave without the fear of consequences or retribution since there has been nothing that would indicate otherwise.

What a sad place this has become.