Posts by Peter-Waterman1

Microsoft and Anthropic play invoice tennis with startup's $17,600 Claude bill

Well Sir, perhaps you should have taken out the advanced DDOS protection from Amazon and not had to pay a penny for your attack.

Judge orders Microsoft to spill internal docs and scour execs' comms in secondhand licensing case

Re: “Why it had not disclosed it earlier”

I suspect that a lot of the reason why they did it was to try to shaft customers who wanted to use Amazon and Google. From what I remember, the old Windows licenses could be taken to the Cloud on dedicated host in other cloud providers. By moving everyone to subscription licenses they took away the ability and then offered a "discount" on Azure or you had to pay through the nose on other Clouds. I suspect True Value then got swept up in it all.

Autonomous AI attacks pose 'clear and present danger' to critical infrastructure

Re: Use the ostrich defence

The AI Security Institute report made me pay attention- https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing

Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney

Re: Same revenue booked thrice?

I think that regardless of all the bollox in the earnings which is rightly called out here, it is difficult to argue with a company closing in on $150B in annual revenue growing at nearly 40%. That growth number, plus operating margin, moves every other detail to noise in my opinion.

Microsoft allows BYOL for Amazon RDS. Repeat, Microsoft allows BYOL for Amazon RDS

About ten years too late

Having screwed over their own customers by making them pay for additional SQL licenses on other clouds, Microsoft have realized no one actually uses SQL anymore and can now make their generous concession. I look forward to reading their canned statement about how they are customer obsessed and are embracing a multi-hybrid-hyper-converged-AI-Cloud Era.

Now, if they would only un-bundle co-pilot from everything we would be really cooking on gas, but I guess we will have to wait until 2037 for that to happen, after they get taken to the brink by the EU on anti-competitive behavior.

Google claims to have all the answers for enterprise AI agent sprawl

Re: Oversight and Understanding

I think it comes down to the basic building blocks we have always had shipping code, and now agents. Data controls in place, policies but around whats allowed and whats not allowed, and also in terms of standards and then an Agent Registry where all agents are centralised and have to be approved before they become discoverable. For example, an agent is not allowed to take any sensitive aciton unless approved by a human - eg, you cant send a DM from slack on my behalf unless I approve. All that is controlled in the approval to get your agent published in the registry,

UK watchdog targets Microsoft licensing in cloud competition probe

Re: Better late than never…

Because companies made engineering decisions in the 90s, 00’s to use SQL and it’s difficult to move away. You have teams of staff who would have to learn a new database system, learn Linux, and not everyone wants to do that.

Re: Better late than never…

This - I mean there are so many penalties that Microsoft hit their customers with if they try to move their workloads to anywhere but Azure.

A 40% tax on the windows and SQL license if you move to another cloud, but not Azure

Elimination of Bring your own license, except Azure

Unlimited SQL Virtualisation in Azure, but no where else

180 days of simultaneous on-premises and Azure use during migration but no where else

No dev/test (msdn) on other clod providers, but ok in Azure

Customers wanting to use any other cloud than Azure have to effectively give up all their Windows and SQL licenses and buy them all again, which can cost millions. Its outrageous that its taken seven years for the CMA to act.

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Re: DR book

But what if a drone specifically targeted your other infrastructure centers as well?

Datadog bets DIY AI will mean it dodges the SaaSpocalypse

Re: AyAIAy

Have a downvote for using AI to write your response.

SaaS-pocalypse chatter is doomster pr0n. It would be nice if enterprise IT were boring again

Re: Funny

I agree with this. The bar to build in house has been lowered massively. I think we will see a lot of things come back in house where they pay less, customise more.

Amazon is forging a walled garden for enterprise AI

Re: The Big Lie, Repeated

Maybe they don’t, but they do a pretty good job of mimicking it, from choosing from a range of tools to do a job, to working out the best way to complete it. It might not be reasoning but it’s more than just predicting the next word in a sentence.

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Re: "intelligent athletic apparel"

What about north winds trading!!

Microsoft's data sovereignty: Now with extra sovereignty!

Re: 21th century colonialism

What about Cisco routers or Dell servers? The list is endless no?

Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter

Re: quote: a sum that won’t hurt Big Daddy Redmond too much

Not a gambling person, but my guess if people took a close look at their pension pots they would find that they are also getting rich from the big tech bubble. Let’s hope that when it pops it doesn’t cause too much pain

Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region in trouble again, with EC2 and container services impacted

Errr no thanks….

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Re: This seems both obvious and not exactly harmful...

While using an LLM to spit out text, I don’t see too much of a challenge, but we are moving towards an era when LLMs drive software, and I guess that becomes more of an issue if you can start making the models carry out specific crafted commands based on a keyword. Let’s not let LLMs get control of the nukes just yet.

Amazon grounds drone deliveries in Arizona after two crashed into a crane

Re: HLM's, please parse this:

Should have used Amazon Nova to rat out its own maker

EU regulators let Microsoft off the hook after Teams unbundling pledge

They are hanging it out on windows licensing in other clouds. That’s a much bigger threat to their business than bundling teams. No condescensions from Msft there. Wondering if the EU will bend over for that.

Pre-owned software trial kicks off in UK as Microsoft pushes resale ban

Re: Pre-owned software ..

To be fare to Amazon, I don’t think they have a lot of choice in the matter as the content providers licence films to them, much in the same way Msft is licensing their software to end users

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

Re: Consistency

A challenge is there is a worldwide shortage of GPUs, and trying to maintain clusters for old models while building out new clusters for new models is going to get problematic at some point.

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Re: I'm confused

Sounds to me like someone didn’t pay his bill. Had multiple warnings, had their account suspended when nothing changed. Sounds liike it got reinstated, probably after providing valid payment details. All the bollocks about Amazons cloak and dagger stuff is BS in my opinion

Microsoft hails cloud and AI revenue for boffo earnings

Re: $75 billion revenue a quarter

I remember all the shit posting from the Microsoft fan boys back in the “Cloud wars” days. They kept on ranting on how “Azure is growing faster than AWS” and how “AWS is for startups”, and all that crap. Here we are nearly 20 years after it all started and Microsoft are still way behind. And now everyone is like cloud is old news, it’s all about AI baby!

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

Re: Introspection

Seeing a few use cases where people are using an LLM to provide an idea, then to take the answer and pass to another chat to generate reasons why that idea is bad, and then take both sets of reasoning and pass on to a persona as a judge. You could use different LLM models or the same asking it to take on different roles. Seems to help provide some balance.

Time for Britain's CMA to strike hard – or risk losing the cloud competition fight

Re: Clowns

How would you enforce no exit fees on Netflix? They use AWS and I’m sure they would be delighted to have no fees to pay for data out. Not sure exit fees is the right thing to focus on, otherwise it’s free internet bandwidth no?

Maybe they could focus on specific type of network traffic out? Replicated VMs or containers so that you have some portability?

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: Press X to Doubt

5 nines has long been a gold standard for high-availability systems. But dont conflate design intent with real-world practicality and cost-efficiency.

S3’s design availability of 99.99% reflects the reality of running at massive scale, with global durability and geographic redundancy built in. That's something even the best on-premises solutions struggle to match without significant investment in infrastructure, personnel, and failover mechanisms. And that’s before considering patching, upgrades, hardware failures, and human error—all handled automatically or abstracted away in S3. Yes, the service credits may not feel generous, but the real value is in not needing them. Outages in S3 are rare and typically short-lived—compare that to diagnosing and resolving hardware or software issues in your own data center at 3 a.m.

AWS claims 50% of Azure workloads would jump ship if licensing costs allowed

Damn right! Well Said.. Microsoft are a bunch a wankers though, thats for sure.

LLM providers on the cusp of an 'extinction' phase as capex realities bite

I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion but I just had Claude Sonnet 3.7 write me a doc every bit as good as I could, maybe that says something about my doc writing! I’m sure ChatGPT could do it as well. It saved me at least five hours and I got my doc out in a morning rather than taking a few days. I'm now turbo charged in productivity. Seems very helpful to me. Hit me with them down votes!

There are 10,000 reasons to doubt Oracle Cloud's security breach denial

I remember Larry going on stage at Oracle world some years back, it’s on you tube, and the dude literally spends 10 minutes attacking AWS security. Talking about how Oracle cloud 2.0 was vastly superior yada yada yada.

Why he was using his keynote to give airtime about AWS I don't know, but its kind of ironic rhat a few years later it turns out their security is crap.

Amazon, Meta, Google sign pledge to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050

Re: Amazon, Meta, Google sign pledge to triple nuclear waste by 2050

At least its something?? Although seems to be kicking this into the long to grass. What about msft??

Microsoft: So what if it costs 4X as much to run Windows Server in AWS, Alibaba, and Google?

Re: re: because it's the base of what some customers "need".

The argument you put forward is don’t use Windows. In reality, an old, but critical application running on .Net must run on windows. There are millions of these applications out there and trying to make them run on Linux requires investment and time, both of which companies don’t have for these applications.

Your argument is flawed sir.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

It looks like it uses the vehicle's onboard power systems, presumably diesel. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/serkan-k-b4b841a8_laser-air-defense-activity-7221442716847509504-t7JM/

"Power and Thermal Management:

- Integrated Power Supply: The system is designed to draw power from the vehicle’s onboard power supply, with additional provisions for dedicated power sources to ensure sustained operation."

GenAI comes for jobs once considered 'safe' from automation

The article doesn’t say replace roles, rather than certain roles will be affected. It goes into say people will be able to do a lot more with AI.

Developer pockets $2M in savings from going cloud-free

You clearly have no idea about cloud.

Google files first ever complaint with European Commission against Microsoft

Re: A pox on both their houses

Google has a search monopoly; they have an anti-trust case against them. Does that mean they can't call out Msft about their monopoly? It doesn't stop the fact that customers are getting screwed by Microsoft. I say go for it, Microsoft deserve it.

As Oracle's AWS deal completes Big 3 triumvirate, questions remain over licensing

Re: So, they're throwing in the towel on OCI?

Nah OCI is dead, Oracle is being sued for blowing up "Cloud" revenue and tricking investors

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/11/oracle_cloud_sales_case/

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

Re: Decisions, decisions...

Get back to work Bill

Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns

Re: Large companies should be able to produce their own software.

Right… but then this article is essentially about securing your data correctly. The way the world is going, this should be the #1 priority. Once you have good control over your data, you should be able to use other people’s software without constantly worrying about your data security.

Right… but then this article is essentially about securing your data correctly. The way the world is going, this should be the #1 priority. Once you have good control over your data, you should be able to use other people’s software without constantly worrying about your data security.

UK tech pioneer Mike Lynch dead at 59

It’s certainly a crazy coincidence.

Gas pipeline players in talks to fuel AI datacenter demand

Re: AI is a front for ...

I love the LLMs. They are going to revolutionise the way we interact with information forever. But can’t they build mini nuclear plants rather than using gas? Seems like building more fossil powered stations is going the wrong way. Maybe the tech is not ready for prime time yet but I remember reading about a few companies developing mini plants.

Amazon: Our cloud growth just sped up. Did you know we are also quite a big retailer?

Re: Missed the Boat

I think you are right—I hadn't really thought about that, but I guess that's why they created it in the first place; it makes total sense. Still, it seems like they (Dell/HP et al.) really failed to respond in any meaningful way. Their growth has stagnated. HP revenue was 29.14B in 2019, and the same five years later. Almost the same with Dell. Feels like they lack vision

Missed the Boat

I was working at Dell back in 2012, and remember thinking Cloud seems to be a thing, and why, given Dell manufacturers servers, aren’t they building their cloud to compete. The commentary within Dell was around Cloud was too expensive, customers trying it and “repatriating” workloads back on prem and generally putting fingers in ears and saying Cloud wouldn’t take off. HP did try to create Cloud, but it just didn’t really get anywhere and they killed it off.

Seems like they both missed the boat and couldn’t recognise the threat to their business models, or were too unwieldy to respond. It now seems they will suffer from a slow decline and eventual death or consultation, selling of parts of the business that can’t withstand the competition. Kind of reminds me of Blockbusters or BlackBerry. But what is perplexing to me, is the meteoric rise of Dells share price, which doesn’t seem to reflect revenue stagnation and now decline.

Microsoft remains massively profitable, investors await AI payoff

Re: A New World

Windows market share (server) has been declining year on year for a while now, with the primary reason that companies have been slowly moving to containers, and serverless, both of which run on Linux. I mean, it is technically possible to run Windows containers, but I think it's well-established that Linux is the way to go.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

Yes, crappy update, it happens; Microsoft release them all the time, and that's why you patch development and not go to production first without testing

Re: Ahhh, the Cloud, the Cloud

From what I read and widely speculated, cause that's fun to do, it seems like Crowndstrike released a dodgy update, and Microsoft rolled it out to production without testing probably and borked Azure. If that's true, there are so many questions, like why Microsoft is deploying things globally, or if you deployed it locally and borked something, why does it have a global effect - ie, WW dependency on some service - AD cough cough. But it is all speculation, but that's what we are here for right....now where is my pitch fork

Re: Related?

Let's test patches before we roll them out....nah, testing is for pussies.

Microsoft wasn't CISPE's only suitor – it seems Google was willing to pay for its views on cloudy licensing to prevail

Re: You gotta love the hypocrisy..

Customers who want to choice use open source, when you look at Linux market share, it's clear that this is the direction of travel for the majority, hell half of Azure run on Linux anyway.