Posts by da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709

IBM to create 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle database license

Licence changes faster than HW dev time

IBM making a mistake here, you have to think. It's faster to change licensing rules, than to develop new silicon.

Court voids 34,000 unfair Fuji Xerox contracts

Re: Is there a single printer vendor...

Nope - OKI messed with me. I bought an MFP from them with £400 cash-back if you "mail in this voucher by 31st December". I mailed it, a couple of days late, due to delivery issues and New Year. They refused to honour the discount. Yes, technically my fault as I missed the date, however the kind of taste that leaves in your mouth as this was a "sales incentive" and the way I was treated when I asked them nicely to honour the £400 discount on the £2000 printer, means I will not buy a printer from them again. And they get this "free" advertising in public.

As for the cost of toner directly from OKI vs other suppliers? Hahahahahaha.

HMRC: UK techies' IR35 tax appeals could take years

Re: It figures

And more than a little one-sided with that insert in the article dear Reg. How about stating how much HMRC spend on operating the legislation, vs how much tax they are recouping? It doesn't pay for itself. I speak as a Ltd company owner and ex-freelancer, and now an employee. I have so few of the risks I had, less flexibility for R&D equipment and learning, and pay a shit load of tax more than I used to. Having lived both lives, it is not fair to take PAYE and income tax from genuine contractors taking material risks, treating them as employees without giving them the benefits. How to kill a freelance sector - way to go HMRC. Meh.

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Re: Absolutely brilliant idea!!

And your wife has you posting as a cross-dressing guinea-pig from Borneo, playing chess in the FIDE World Champs, all without you have to click a single button.

UK Test and Trace finding consultant habit hard to break: More contracts go to Deloitte and Accenture

Peanuts …

… monkeys. “Skills in short supply”. Next.

Samsung reveals buzzword-compliant DRAM ready for 5G, AI, edge, and metaverses

How is RAM "compatible" with 5G

I sob when I hear marketing droids talk this nonsense. Too many vendors provide memory clock frequencies and CPU core counts then make some utterly stupid correlation to fitness for designing power stations or modelling a knitting pattern, or indeed using a network signalling standard. Stop it. It makes you look dumb.

What a Mesh: Microsoft puts Office in the Loop, adds mixed reality tech to Teams

Shouldn't Teams WORK before adding 3D crap?

Who asked for 3D avatar bollox? I'd like Teams to be reliable, work with my devices, support an anonymous mode (not be hard-linked into whatever hybrid-joined AzureAD identity currently has credCache tokens) and have much clearer privacy options. At no point did I ask for a 3D meta-whatnot needing a chunky GPU to animate a paperclip or my furrowed brow as I deal with yet another emergency Day 0 security fix across my Windows server estate. That is all.

Brit MPs blast Baroness Dido Harding's performance as head of NHS Test and Trace

Re: Scientists and Science

Really sorry, but when Sprocket and Clunk (Whitty and Vallance) put that "exponential graph" up during a 6pm briefing with the PM, they took ownership of the fear and doubt that has been deliberately spread across our population. It has also eroded to dangerous levels our trust in government. We are seeing it in the vaccination numbers in England for 12-15 yo children, who do not need the vaccine. This is supported by the data, which puts the incidence of adverse effects of the vaccine higher than the incidence of adverse effects of contracting and dealing with COVID-19 in that age group. Gubbermint needs to stop nannying us, and start sharing real data, without interpretation. They're at it again with "60,000 will die from flu because we made you lockdown" - Prof Van Tam, not his wording, obviously. It saddens me that Dido still gets asked to manage anything requiring a secure operating model. In the private sector, wouldn't happen.

VMware imagines 'memory servers' – a new source of shared software-defined RAM

Bullshit ...

Quoting, "memory seems to be the last item of hardware that hasn't been virtualised" ... I refer VMware to the Burroughs Corporation B5000 from 1961. The first computer with virtualised memory.

Next.

Memory price 'correction' is coming, world's fourth-largest DRAM-maker warns

Just me, or ...

... did anyone else not understand whether the price was going UP or DOWN until the last paragraph? Sheesh.

LOL ;-) UK govt 2 pay £39m 4 txt msgs 4 less thn 2 yrs

Re: Sigh...

The alternative is campaigning for "None of the above" to be added to voting slips in a General Election. This forces each party to realise that none of them have a mandate to govern us as "least worst" is not something the UK voting population enjoys particularly much and which we've been stuck with for the last ohhhh ..... 30 years? Destroying the two-party pendulum will help tremendously. Giving "cheaper beer" away to win votes, while having a little policy on page 76 of your manifesto saying "we will introduce laws restricting your freedom based on data we don't understand" isn't an appealing option IMHO.

Verified: UK.gov launching plans for yet another digital identity scheme

Re: Don't hold your breath

Replace them with who/what? THAT is the problem. Very little worth voting for, across the board.

United, Mesa airlines order 200 electric 19-seater planes for short-hop flights

Re: 250 mile range/19 passengers

Yup. With the travel to/from an airport and the security check-in faff, that is a no-brainer, and "no market here" proposition.

Microsoft solicits Clippy comeback – later reveals it had already decided to bring back the peppy paperclip

Up there with moving Outlook calendar buttons

This nonsense is up there with moving the Outlook calendar buttons way over to the right of Outlook, miles away from the relevant appointment data your eyes need to know which button you want. How do they qualify "what users want"? It's clear, apparently. A mere 20k of Twitter upvotes and they change the experience of the entire customer base. Wow. The contempt for user experience is palpable.

NHS England staff voice concerns about access controls on US spy-tech firm Palantir's COVID-19 data store

Re: blah, blah, blah

Both sides of the referendum played fast and loose with facts and the truth. If that is the only form of democracy our politicians allow us, we have to take it and work with it.

Experian vows to drag UK's Information Commissioner's Office to court after being told off for data-slurping practices

I never provided anything to any of them ...

Try and get a credit card without your PII in one of those three agencies in the UK. Nothing short of extortion. When they mess up, like sending your credit report by post to your address with someone else's name on the letter (looking at you Experian) the consequences to them are 0.00000000001%. To me that is a 100% impact enabling identity theft with years of rebuilding a score that they make up. They are not accountable to anyone other than the ICO. Let them be accountable.

Yes, we have a 5G iPhone now. But that doesn't mean 5G has arrived

Still waiting to watch TV on my 3G network launched March 3rd, 2003

... as promised when 3G networks were launched on March 3rd 2003, spectrum sold, and operators hyped (H3G looking at you). I can't even listen to a streaming radio service for an entire 4 minute song going by train from Tunbridge Wells to London today. So all you operators and marketeers promising whatever it is that you are promising, I stopped listening a LONG time ago. I will adopt a networking tech 1-2 years after it arrives having pleased end users with useful services and reliable data. I am not prepared to be an out of pocket early adopter for you. Next.

Dying software forces changes to VMware’s vSphere Clients

Re: I hear

Ummm ... the red thingy is ... ummmm .... moving towards the green thingy ... ummmm

Borking all over the world: At home or abroad, you're never more than 6ft from a BSOD

Depth of troubleshooting that ensued ...

... if you call Microsoft support, this is likely to stop at "what's the code, oh, reinstall windows and tell me if it fixes the problem". Really, I've had tons of this recently with Azure AD hybrid workstation joins and identity problems in Office 360 [beeeep] Microsoft 360 caused by broken AD Connect synchronisation between on-prem AD and Azure AD. One hapless support "Ambassador" gave me a link to paid Azure support, at $250/incident. I politely refused, as I've already paid for support in my Microsoft 360 licensing costs. I asked him to stop helping me and find someone else.

It is a world of pain, with remarkably little help from the provider of the software. Maybe I just need to pay for Enterprise Support to get sensible help. YMMV.

Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business

1992 Toshiba Satellite P90 4MB first colour TFT with W98 and Eddie Brickell

Oh the memories. I bought for £4k, yes ... £4k in Sterling one of the first available colour TFT screened Satellite laptops. Had it imported to EU from US, and spent a mortgage like wod on it. Took it with me on a ski season to stay online and developing while in the snow. The Eddie Brickell song "Good Times" from the W98 Plus CDROM still takes me back to those crazy crazy times ...

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Re: HR droids...

I think I interviewed with that company after finishing my Comp Science degree in Edinburgh. As I'd been writing lots of assembler for Z80, 65C02 and M68000 I mistakenly used MUL for multiply instead of the pseudo-code mnemonic which I now forget - it was maybe MLT. Do a replace of all the MULs with their thing and I would have achieved a near perfect score. They failed me, I reckon, as I didn't get past that interview.

Lucky escape IMHO.

Amazon flicks switch on AI-powered enterprise search service Kendra – but where are all the connectors?

Yeah ... but

... I would proffer that if you have 500,000 documents under management control, you have too many. You need to be more prescriptive with the term "document". By avoiding the noise, and being able to find what you are looking for from a small subset, quality and access are improved and benefits realised. Indexing everything, using something like the private Google Search Engine pointed at a fileshare, is just adding to noise. As usual, it is the humans that will tame the technology. I am keen to see how good Kendra is at getting me what I am looking for, rather than 5,950,000 hits for the term "storage latest WDC". I probably only want 3 out of those, sniff.

Former Oracle product manager says he was forced out for refusing to deceive customers. Now he's suing the biz

"Those aren't bugs, they are upgrades undocumented alternative licensable features!"

FTFY - The Cisco way.