Posts by Sparkus

Vulcan Centaur avoids FAA scrutiny after losing solid rocket booster nozzle

The nozzle failed at srb ignition

A pending burn through was apparent even at that point.

A year after taking on Intel's NUC mini-PCs, Asus says it's ready to improve them

The AlderLake N100 compute sticks from MeLe are very nice.

I have three of them running around the house on non-smart TVs.

Post-CrowdStrike catastrophe, Microsoft figures moving antivirus out of Windows kernel mode is a good idea

I'm imaging one mess

will transition to another.

Think Kerberos, action tickets, and ticket-granting-tickets all mixed in with master certs and programmed and managed by existing Microsoft care and attention to detail.

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

No Sympathy

The ever-upward creep of cloud pricing, both in real terms and in relative comparison to on-prem costs, was openly predicted by quite a few people.

Intel's 120 TOPS Lunar Lake AI PC chips have landed

Desperately seeking.......

CUDA performance numbers for Adobe, DxO, and Davinci Studio.,.........

Microsoft PC accessories rise from the grave just in time for Christmas

Bring Back......

the Thumball......

France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes

I for one hope

that this sets a much-needed global precedent for responsibility and accountability.

This and insurance companies refusing to write cover for CxO suite malfeasance and stupidity.........

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Customer with a passion for clean floors......

.......which extended into mopping the computer center and then using a motorized floor buffer / polisher to finish up..........

Equinix pilots use of fuel cell in 'shipping container' outside datacenter

So.....

hydrogen wells are plentiful in Ireland then?

Microsoft tweaks fine print to warn everyone not to take its AI seriously

This will be news to.....

firms like Thomson-Reuters who have invested huge amounts of financial capital and corporate reputation in their deployment of msft AI tools within their own products.......

Gas pipeline players in talks to fuel AI datacenter demand

I've written it before...

Get a utilities map of the US (or UK for that matter) showing high-pressure gas pipelines, cable backbones, and high-voltage/capacity power lines. Plot the intersections with a 20-50 km circle.

There's your potential siting for new data centers.

Icelandic group demos private cloud powered by renewables

Don't forget....

the awesome amount of connectivity, availability, redundancy, and sheer bandwidth available in Iceland. They're a hub for a large number of trans-Atlantic fiber cable systems.......

NASA mulls using SpaceX in 2025 to rescue Starliner pilots stuck on space station

Re: Momentary Lapse of Reason.

In the absence of a hot stick and active control inputs during flight, meatbags are indeed 'cargo'.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: DOS WordPerfect 5.1 spellchecker

Ipaq // Iraq

speaking of the olden days of yore and fable............

wondering whatever happened to pc-write?

Another law firm piles on Intel for Raptor Lake CPU failures as complaints grow louder

unclear if

the 'problem' includes mobile as well as desktop CPUs.

Anyone?

Delta Air Lines dials up Microsoft's legal nemesis over CrowdStrike losses

SolarWinds seems to be dodging responsibility / accountability for their failings......

The CS event was....

.....enabled by a combination of bad build and testing on the part of CS **and** (don't forget) deliberate design decision by msft to hide a set of API calls that set their own internal AV solution (Defender) at a significant performance advantage compared to third-party tools.

When msft was caught with their design pants down, the decision was made to open those APIs up to everyone and anyone when the rational/good design decision should have been to kill off the calls.

And that's how we got here.

The court case that needs to be settled is if msft and their managers/executives are liable for global user damages caused by poor design and implementation of their products.

Inquiry hears UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal

at what point does....

"misleading information" become "intentional lies"?

Post-CrowdStrike, Microsoft to discourage use of kernel drivers by security tools

Once upon a time....

you know, when Ring 0 was inviolate, NT 3.51 was pretty dammed stable. Life Critical application stable.

Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space

Soooooo

have these lessons learned been fully incorporated into the RS-25-E engine?

Lenovo brings virtualization, cloud stack to Chinese chip designer Loongson's CPU arch

Re: Linux machines

If true, that will be a temporary problem.

DARPA searched for fields quantum computers really could revolutionize, with mixed results

Similar in every way to

current efforts in non-intelligent but heavily cross-referenced and matrixed "AI".

AT&T forbidden from cutting landline services to large parts of California

one day

someone is going to come up with a scheme to buy out old unused pots cabling and recycle them for the copper....

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

So damned easy to "accept responsibility"

when you know for a fact that there will be no accountability......

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

Dear AI Sheeple

Told ya so

Respectfully,

Everyone

Microsoft revives Windows 10 Beta Channel even though OS doesn't have long left

remember....

The term 'bit rot' originated with msft products.......

sounds to me like

someone at msft has realized that their current internal testing regime sucks.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries bets big on small turbines for datacenters

Data Centers can literally located anywhere

and they are.

Pull up a utility routing map that shows high-voltage main lines, high-capacity natgas pipelines, and fiber cable routes.

Now draw a 10-25 km circle at likely intersections.

Those are where mega data centers have been built the past 30 years and will continue to be built.

Any waving of hands with "what about the supporting infrastructure" is spurious at best.................

Was there no one at Microsoft who looked at Recall and said: This really, really sucks

msft is leading their CoPilot partner/launch partners like Thomson-Reuters as through they were pigs-to-slaughter. Zero liability for msft, huge danger to customer base, public perception, and viability of these seven launch partners.

No mystery here.

For the past couple of years, msft has been throwing their bad ideas up on a wall and using public opinion/horror to judge what they can get away with and how fast.

The last msft executive 'leader' that was fired for making bad decisions was who?

It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

Well, I'm going my part...

Over the past three years, I've been involved in the migration of some 48,000 server instances, Windows, Linux, from VMWare (hosted at both leased/cloud facilities and hosted locally/on-prem) to cloud native instances NOT using any VMWare product.

And my experience is hardly unique. Colleagues at other firms have done more work in this are than have I.

Go after UnitedHealth, not us, 100+ medical groups urge Uncle Sam

eggs, meet basket

too big to fail, too big to investigate, too big to trust.

AI might be coming for your job, but Sam Altman can't go on dinner dates anymore

It's not safety, it's not security

It's accountability, first of all at the human level. Then at the corporate level.

As in other industries the past 30 years, safety/security concerns and practices/procedures aren't 'backed' by much more than a "lessons were learned, adjustments made, we promise to do better in future" while actual human lives are lost.

It's well past time when the C Suite is held, directly responsible in some very personal and impactful ways for the suitability and behaviors of their companies and products.

Microsoft's Brad Smith summoned by Homeland Security committee over 'cascade' of infosec failures

another case of

"too big to fail = too big to trust"

Starlink geofence appears to have some gaping holes

Don't attribute any nobility to Starlink......

It's not that they 'don't offer service'. It's that they are not licensed to provide service by the local government/PTT entities.

IBM sued again for alleged discrimination – this time against White males

IBM is imploding....

in so many different, and avoidable ways. It's almost as if the board and C suite are on a mission to dismantle and dissolve the thing with an eye toward maximum cash-harvesting.

UnitedHealth's 'egregious negligence' led to Change Healthcare ransomware infection

Not blown-away here

Having been inside of Optum, and watched as the old-boy/girl network promote high percentages of connected people without regard for their actual skills or abilities, I'm not blown away at all.

Optum is well-known as a repository where the only accountability is at the lowest level of staff. Once an individual is in a 'leadership' role, part of their job is to expand staff to ensure that a few sacrificial lambs are always available.

Too big to fail = too big to trust. The best approach to security segmentation is to break that monster up.

Ex-Amazon exec claims she was asked to ignore copyright law in race to AI

"Everyone else is doing it."

This is the money quote, for Dr. Ghaderi anyway.

I have the feeling that Amazon will do, say, or pay anything to avoid having Andrey Styskin publicly and legally explain that comment. The document discovery alone is going to be spectacular.

Change Healthcare’s ransomware attack costs edge toward $1B so far

well...

perhaps it's time to break up the Optum mono-culture......

CISA in a flap as Chirp smart door locks can be trivially unlocked remotely

Answerable to no one?

All is would take is for an insurance company or two to send out a notice that they will be denying coverage and claims for any property that uses this suspect tech.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

Flew to South Africa once

..........to troubleshoot and fix a recently delivered laser printer.

Not something you can buy from the corner shop. It was one of those 1980s/1990s beasts that printed at 200 ppm double sided and had 4 input trays, 6 output trays, and an optional roll paper feeder / slicer.

When I got there, found that the local trucking firm that the customer hired (not the one we recommended) had rolled their truck down the side of a mountain. I collected the hazmat imaging belt (we just called it nasty stuff back then), the hard drives with proprietary software. the 6 eeproms with bootup firmware, and sat in the local conservation camp lodge for a week until my bosses and client 'negotiated' how to recover from the mess.

Got some great photos from the pair of game drives we took.

Change Healthcare faces second ransomware dilemma weeks after ALPHV attack

Eggs.....

Meet Basket. At the very least this should prompt all Healthcare CEOs to re-evaluate their dependency on single-source (lock-in) service providers like Optum.

Doesn't matter that Optum is a 'victim' here.

Microsoft unbundling Teams is to appease regulators, not give customers a better deal

Might this herald an opportunity for....

The Triumphant Return of multi-platform (HCL) Notes?

/s

TSMC boss says one-trillion transistor GPU is possible by early 2030s

The IBM Telum chipset

in the current Z series of mainframes is designed and fab'd with all of these stacking and interconnect technologies in mind (and fab'd in 7nm)

You break it, you ... run away and hope somebody else fixes it

Noise? You Want Noise?

How about running alternate column/cascading row test patterns on a 300 card per minute card punch........

I have my own dead list......

After which I can finally relax about the dawning years of my own career..........

Cloud server host Vultr rips user data licensing clause from ToS amid web 'confusion'

as the old sage goes...

"Figures lie and liars figure"

Same goes for overly complicated "boilerplate" legal clauses that are waved away by "context" claims.......

Atos says Airbus flew off, no longer interested in infosec and big data biz

Due dilligence

pays off for Airbus. Must have evaluated the current management-in-place........

LinkedIn's turn to fall over: Outage hits thinkfluencer hub

Considering it's Microsoft....

Any bets on whether or not it's something as banal as expired certs?